Part 15: The Time of Innovation, Batteries and Biofuels, Round Two of the British Invasion, Recycling Into Cars, New Detroit Flagships, Supersonics and Spaceplanes
The election of Barack Obama as the United States' 46th President, and its first ever member of a visible minority. A beautiful wife, two very pretty teenage daughters, a very likable and politically savvy Vice-President and the public confidence of the time meant that Obama soared into office with approval ratings in the high seventies on his inauguration, while Jon Huntsman Jr. and Susan Collins headed out with extremely high approval ratings of their own, and within a year the US Navy asked Huntsman if he would approve of his name being used for the lead ship of a new class of Navy missile cruisers. He approved, and would make a point of being at the launching of USS Huntsman in 2020. Collins was hardly out of politics long, as she was offered her old Senate seat back if she wanted it - but she instead ran, and easily won, a race to be Maine's governor. She only held that position for one term before retiring, but Collins, who by the end of her term had been an elected official for most of a quarter-century, would be regarded as a very good official indeed.
2017 America was riding one of the largest waves of economic expansion in modern times - America's economy grew a remarkable 5.2% in 2016, a growth that was related to both growing industrial output and a steady rise in living standards of all classes of Americans, from the bottom on up. What was more, the idea of corporations being used as a vessel to both make money and accomplish good in the world, once regarded as at the very least naive, was now a common occurence, and those corporations which did make such efforts found them to beneficial to PR and indeed in a great many cases to sales. Automation in many industrial jobs was even starting to reverse in some cases, as in many high-worth jobs that the high cost of industrial robotics (despite decades of development) and the ability of human workers to do continuous quality control had benefits to the products produced. This was not the case in monotonous jobs, of course, but it did not escape anyone's notice that the number of man-hours worked at high-value producers such as Boeing did grow somewhat in the 2010s and 2020s, and the higher costs of labor were in some cases counteracted by the cost of robotic machines. A middle-class American worker would by this point in most cases be able to own their own home, own new cars, be able to afford plenty of luxuries in their lives and be able to send their children to colleges - and all of this had the benefit of also seeing a slow growth in America's savings rate, a fact somewhat spurred on by a slow but steady rise in interest rates in the 2010s, done to counteract the hot economy and keep inflation at minimal levels. It was a time where there was money for good purposes of nearly any sort, and it showed in the level of technical innovation in the labs of American businesses, the government and indeed lots of private inventors and designers who had a dream, and increasingly-powerful personal computers during this time, combined with better and better software for design and modeling, made it easier than ever for a skilled person to follow a dream or work on a real idea of their own.
It was no surprise that into this world automakers had to advance their ideas, too. The second generation of Ford's first entry into the all-electric car world, the Ford Focus Electric, debuted in 2013 to considerable fanfare as a real rival to cars like the Chevrolet Volt and Toyota Prius, though Nissan's launch of the newest Nissan Leaf within weeks of the Focus Electric and BMW following with the i3 city car three months later rather stole Ford's thunder. Fiat and Magna developed a version of the Fiat 500 small car with an electric motor as well, this debuting in 2014. The Focus Electric, however, was not merely a Focus with an electric motor dropped in - the car's electronics were highly-sophisticated and were able to help you plan out how to use the electric car most efficiently, and the vehicle design included everything from solar cells in the roof to help with charging and running accessories, carbon-fiber doors and polycarbonate windows, a thermal management system for the battery pack on board the car and warning sounds so that if pedestrian impacts were possible the car would audibly tell the pedestrians and the driver about the accident potential. Better still, Ford played up the fact that everything about the car was American-made - the drivetrain was made up of electric motors from Cincinatti Milcron, electronics from AMD, Motorola and Emerson Electric, batteries from RCA (and designed by them with the assistance of Dow Chemical) and most of the raw materials used to make the car being from American plants - proof that even in the global world of cars, one could still proudly wave the flag and use local suppliers.
A 2014 BMW i3
But while electric cars came early and often in the 2010s, and hybrids even more so, the problem of battery charging remained. The problem of recharging batteries quickly remained an issue, and while Tesla's Supercharger system was a major step forward in making the idea of a long-distance electric car viable, it did not entirely solve the problem, because the Tesla system, while immensely capable, still didn't entirely fix the problem. Battery capacities on modern electric cars varied - the Tesla Model S, for example, had a power capacity of 40 to 85 kWh, while the Focus Electric had a capacity of 23 kWh and the Nissan Leaf 24 kWh - and while these were good, even the best fact chargers using AC power could charge cars quickly, it still meant waiting periods of a half hour or more, much better than hours but not fast enough to truly be competitive. But as electrical grid technology improved on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as in Asia, Australia and Latin America, things began to change, and by the end of the 2010s the breakthrough was made.
The breakthrough originally came from Israel and Canada, in the form of a joint project between fledgling battery maker Altairnano pairing with Canadian electrical components maker Western Electric and Israeli electric car developer Better Place, which paired up in 2017 to show off development of an electric car system using a 125 kWh solid-state lithium-air battery pack and using supercapacitors as a first source of power, along with Western Electric's prototype "Nuclear Charge" system, which used a charging station using high-voltage DC current, and charging system which allowed the the batteries to all be charged simultaneously, with the power control module taking the incredibly-high incoming current (as much as 225 Amps) and chopping it up to where it was usable. The whole project was installed in a GMC Sierra HD pickup truck, and worked wonders - the system could give the vehicle its full 125 kWh in just ten minutes, a level sufficient to be used commercially, and the battery pack itself was designed to use air as an oxidizer, which gave the batteries a fabulous power-to-weight ratio, though the battery control system was needed to both control charge and discharge but also dehumidify the air going into the battery cells. The system also used a fail-safe system, shutting off automatically if there was not a 100%-certain connection between the battery control system and the charger - a fail-safe built for safety reasons, as the charge going in at this rate would be invariably fatal if one was exposed to it. The Sierra FEV (Future Electric Vehicle) was soon under examination by General Motors itself and other automakers, and similar ideas soon were under development by everyone, though with differing battery designs. Regardless of the potential issues, it was much too good of a potential opportunity to pass up, and so development began in a big hurry on the new battery system.
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It was so obvious that a lot of chemists, engineers, researchers and physicists at the major companies would be later kicking themselves for not thinking 'why did we not think of that before?' The idea of dividing down current has been the very basis of modern power grids, and the Nuclear Charge system just does what a modern power grid does on a smaller scale. Lithium-air batteries give the better power to weight ratio, and the whole system was designed with use in cars in mind. 125 kilowatt hours in ten minutes was too much potential to be ignored, and so everyone got on it right away, and the companies who developed the first such system made a killing on it."
-- Dr. Benjamin Alejandros, Researcher at the University of Southern California, interviewed by the Los Angeles Times in 2018
A 2018 GMC Sierra HD pickup truck similar to the one used in development of the Nuclear Charge system
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Anyone with a brain could see that if a small company like Tesla could make a fantastic electric car, then it was only a matter of time before they became truly viable in the marketplace, and once the problem of recharge was figured out, it was off to the races. Electric cars were never going to take over the whole market, everyone knew that from the start. But there would always be a market for them, and once the job of making the system able to be charged quickly was done, the internal combustion engine had its first real rival."
-- Richard Meaden, EVO UK former editor and contributor, 2021
While the worry about fossil fuels was still as real as the sunrise, there was still room for that world to use internal combustion engines, a fact evidenced by many years of work on biofuels and the 2014 introduction of the first widely-available biodiesels. The use of corn-based E85 ethanol had been a popular act in the later 2000s and early 2010s, but corn-based ethanol by 2017 was regarded as an energy pit and contributing to problems with food prices. One answer, this one coming from Virginia company Atlantic Resources and South Dakota-based Broin Company, was the use of cellulosic ethanol made from plant waste. Their plans were based around the idea of collecting all kinds of plant waste, using a chemical process to separate the cellulose from it, then feeding the cellulose to specially-developed bacteria, which would break it down into sugars, which were then fermented with yeast. The resulting ethanol was both very pure and powerful, and the potential of it being made from what was mostly leftovers from other food or fuel production had major possibilities, particularly as the process was able to also be done with fairly minimal outside energy output, particularly when compared to corn-based ethanol fuels.
ExxonMobil, meanwhile, was working on its own way forward using methanol fuel, by using high-temperature and pressure steam in a blast furnace, converting woody biomass into water gas, then synthesizing it into fuel methanol, but Exxon faced a major issue in that methanol is a strong corrosive to a number of forms of metal, particularly aluminum - which most car engines were made mostly of by this point. Regardless, Exxon continued work on the idea, as well as on production of hydrogen, which most people figured was the fuel of the future - though the amount of hydrogen needed to make an entire economy run on it was immense, of course. The methanol system had advantages in that it could also be produced from gasification of coal as well as from biomass, providing a potential way of using America's enormous coal reserves aside from straight burning it to produce electric power.
Hess Energy offered a third approach, that being conventional gasoline made from synthetic crude, using the well-proven Fischer-Tropsch process. They proposed repurposing coal trains from western mines to plants in the Midwest instead of coal-fired power plants, and then also using unit trains to carry the synthetic crude out to refineries. They also proposed a system of plants in post-industrial eastern communities that had ready access to rail lines, creating new jobs and using existing infrastructure. The battle over what to do absorbed everyone, namely because all of the proposals for short-term alternative fuels - electric, cellulosic ethanol, methanol, synthetic crude - all had merit and all had money backing them up, a fact which made development faster and increasing supply. General Motors was a big back of electric cars, as was Ford. Chrysler, with its extensive experience in diesel engines thanks to Cummins, their locomotive division and their French partners, favored the biofuels route, particularly biodiesel. AMC, which also had diesel experience but all of whose aluminum engines had steel cylinder liners and was increasingly using direct injection, liked the alcohol fuel idea.
Both the large numbers of baby boomers buying cars and the growing young population of America also doing so was a sign that the sports car boom was due to keep going - and Magna and Gurney Austin Rover both spent the later parts of the 2010s seeking to cash in. Magna had bought famed British maker TVR from Russian Nikolai Smolensky after Frank Stronach was introduced to their cars by former owner Peter Wheeler. Upon news that TVR would be going out of production in 2009, Stronach bought it with his own funds, and merged it into Magna Automobiles when the company bought its chunk of GM. By the mid-2010s, TVR was back on form, and in 2016, their newest cars headed to North America - first to Canada, then eventually to the United States as well. The first TVRs to come to North America, the Tuscan 2 sports car and the Typhon GT, though the remake of the classic Griffith sports car began arriving in North America in 2017. The TVRs arriving had to be modified for US conditions, namely the addition of anti-lock brakes, airbags and traction control, all of which had been absent from past TVRs but which were all required by North American legislation. Magna-era TVRs also soon gained improvements to deal with problems the previous cars had, such as galvanised metal in their frames and carbon fiber-reinforced plastic bodywork to replace brittle fiberglass. The cars were soon popular in the states, owing to their awesome power to weight ratios and outlandish styling. Magna's selling of TVR was just the beginning, though.
A 2016 TVR Typhon
Gurney Austin Rover had been a result of racing legend Dan Gurney's buying of financially-crippled British behemoth British Leyland in 1981, brought about the British government's wish to sell and Gurney, who was the owner of a bunch of BL franchises, wishing not to totally lose his investment. By the 1990s, however, they were back in force - having trimmed the marques down to Austin, Rover, Triumph and Land Rover, they were back to making profits and had carved out niches, with Austin being sold as every day cars, while Rover was aimed at Jaguar, Triumph at BMW and Land Rover having a niche all of their own, though luxury SUVs from Lexus, Infiniti, Mercedes-Benz, Cadillac and Lincoln were now common and good rivals. The company by this point had carved out its American niche, while also owning nearly two-fifths of the British market and having good positions in Europe and the Middle East. The 1990s and 2000s, however, saw a raft of sports car manufacturers spring up in Great Britain, many using known names, all of which had big dreams. Makes like Lotus, TVR, Jaguar and Triumph all of a sudden had a big raft of rivals. McLaren, Marcos, Westfield, Ariel, Jensen and Ginetta all entered the sports car world in this time period, with the spectrum covered - with the Marcos Marcasite SR300, with its 3.6-liter Chevrolet V6 engine, simple chassis design and $40,000 price tag on one end, the McLaren P1 hypercar, with its state of the art engineering, hybrid-electric booster drivetrain and $1 million price tag, on the other. Most of these also used either Austin Rover or Detroit power, with Marcos and Ariel using GM power and Ginetta, Jensen and Westfield all using Ford power. Caterham made a splash with its introduction in North America in 2014 by setting up its Academy series immediately in the United States and Canada and hosting a 2014 race series using its insane Levante version of the venerable Caterham 7 sports car, an evolved variant of Colin Chapman's famous Lotus Seven of the 1960s - and the Levante became even more famous when Jeff Gordon spectacularly crashed one in one in the one-make race held at the NASCAR event at Riverside. The Ariel Atom, long famous for stretching British TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson's face in a legendary test of it, became more famous still when one was bought by Hollywood actor Josh Hutcherson, and was driven by him in a famous race against a NASCAR Sprint Cup car driven by Joey Logano where the Atom won a race between them at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course filmed for Top Gear USA. Indeed, the Atom ultimately sold more cars in America than in any other market.
A 2015 Marcos Marcasite TS500, an improved version of the SR300
A Caterham Levante
By the mid to late 2010s the United States was swelling an industry all new to it, and one which began to be a major deal for many of the people involved - that being recycling. As most materials used in industrial societies are recyclable, and that amount was growing thanks to advances in technology and recycling programs, it was soon making sense for companies to do so for profit. This had been known for some time to scrap metal merchants and the like, but time was turning this into major businesses. Detroit was a pioneer in 2011 in setting up a facility to mechanically separate household garbage and advance a recycling program, with the city able to use its recycling programs for profit after selling the collected materials to a company for re-use - and Detroit again kicked the game further but offering rebates on property taxes on this who recycle in larger amounts and a buy-back program for used consumer electronics, where broken or worn-out electronic goods would be collected by the city, with the person being paid for the goods in cash. This allowed Detroit to dramatically step up its waste diversion rate throughout the 2010s, and the city also mandated a number of preservation ordinances in the city. By the late 2010s, Detroit's Department of Conservation and Waste Management was making money for the city, and was by this point supplying raw materials to the automobile manufacturers, as well as to construction firms and other industrial producers.
Taking this one step further was companies like Bethlehem Steel and American Plastics, who would buy the recyclables from municipalities and transport them themselves to be used for new materials, with the later creating a series of programs to allow plastics, particularly those from scrapped cars and worn-out electronics, to be used for new products. American Plastics in 2016 began a program working with Fisker, AMC and Magna to provide them with parts and materials for their cars, with the company developing forms of recycling which used small amounts of new materials to develop material that was just as good as before if not better. RCA added to this in the late 2010s by offering a buyback program where a person that recycled used materials and/or batteries would be entered into a database which allowed them to purchase new goods from RCA for a cheaper price. RCA would not be the last to do this, and the overall benefits of it saw recycling rates in America swell regularly over the 2010s. Indeed, it was not just environmentally-minded cities like San Francisco, Portland and Seattle which did well here - indeed, among the cities which did the best for improving their waste conversion rates included New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit and Philadelphia. AMC hit a milestone in 2016, when they were proud to announce that their newest flagship car, the AMX4 sports car, was made over 80% of recycled materials - most of its interior, its aluminum chassis, fiberglass bodywork, glass or polycarbonate windows, magnesium alloy wheels and most of its interior components were made of recycled materials. (It didn't hurt that the AMX4 was also one of the fastest cars made in America at the time and was available for less than $60,000.) As the recycled material was of high quality and was able to be used for most parts of a car, there was benefit to it from a cost standpoint and as it didn't cause issues with vehicle quality, there was no reason not to.
AMC's introduction of the AMX4 in 2016 ran up against the similarly new for 2016 Ford Daytona, which were themselves up against the new-for-2014 SRT Viper GTS and Chevrolet Corvette C7, which of course saw them all rival each other. The AMX4 at 3275 lbs was heavier than the Daytona, but it sported the same 3.8-liter twin-turbocharged V6 as the Nissan GT-R, which AMC rated at 546 horsepower. (Nissan claimed 480 horsepower in the GT-R, but numerous tests had long proven their sandbagging on this.) The C7 Corvette sported a 5.5-liter V8 making 475 horsepower, and was slightly heavier at 3300 lbs. The Viper had an enormous 8.4-liter V10 with a massive 640 horsepower, weighing in at 3440 lbs. The Daytona also used a V10, Ford's new 6.4-liter unit, making 526 horsepower, inside the handsome Daytona coupe. The AMX4 was the only mid-engined car of the bunch and also used Lamborghini-style vertical doors, both of which made a style statement.
The first comparison of all of these cars together was by EVO America in their March 2016 issue, where they took all four and tossed them against the DeLorean MR25 and Saleen S5S Raptor, as well as the best rivals from Abroad - the Lotus Esprit, Ferrari 458 Italia, Lamborghini Gallardo, Nissan GT-R, Audi R8, TVR Typhon and Lexus LFA. They ranked the awesome Ferrari #1 overall, but put the AMX4 in second and the Corvette third, noting that the AMX4 was a handling dream and the Corvette a masterpiece in every way.
A drawing of the 2016 AMC AMX4 sports car
Amongst the development of the 2010s was new rivals for some American companies. Boeing, having vanquished its rivals in the domestic aircraft industry, was seeing problems in other areas, as one of their old ideas had been taken by Bombardier in Canada and made into reality, with Bombardier's RS400 and CS300 aiming at segments of Boeing's markets. The RS400 had been designed with the ability to cruise at 45,000 feet and at Mach 0.94-0.98, which gave it a considerable speed advantage of long-distance flights over existing airliners. Bombardier's move was a surprise to Boeing, even though they had known of Bombardier's development of a 787 rival for some time. Combined with the new arrival of the Airbus A350 in 2015, the RS400 meant that Boeing's position was weakened - and Airbus' enormous A380 was hurting Boeing in the long-distance aircraft category, as the Boeing 747-8 was not as good at long-distance amenities as the double-deck A380 was, in large part because the airlines could create better amenities with A380's huge interior volume.
Boeing's answer was to take the data developed by DARPA and work on reviving its ideas of supersonic airliners. Boeing's 2747 project began in the early 2010s and would not produce a real airliner until the late 2010s, Boeing's research did indicate ways of knocking down the problem of sonic boom produced by airliners, and reduce the problem of sonic boom to a sufficient degree that it made the aircraft viable. This included a more bulbous nose to the aircraft, under-wing engines and a narrower-span wing which also used CAD designs to make waves which interfere with each other, which was helped by the use of dropping leading edges similar to the 1960s North American XB-70 bomber. The design's large lower fuselage and the need for ways of reducing sonic boom resulted in two large pods under each wing, each with two engines and intakes for said engines shaped similar to the Busemann's Biplane design, further reducing the sonic boom problem. Boeing's design was intelligent, and new of it breaking out saw the rest of the world's aircraft manufacturers get on the development of new aircraft for themselves which were meant to go supersonic.
While Boeing was doing that, a transatlantic upstart was about to upstage them. Reaction Engines Limited, a company with headquarters operations in Oxfordshire in Great Britain and New Jersey in the United States, had been working for years on a design of a single-stage to orbit spacecraft which could takeoff and fly like any other conventional aircraft, soar into space, release a payload and then fly back to Earth. Their spaceplane design, known as the Skylon, was remarkably simple, though it's major challenge was its engines. Powered by liquid hydrogen and air when in the atmosphere, at high speeds the Sabre engines would close and mix liquid oxygen from tanks in the spacecraft to allow it to race to orbit. The design was controlled remotely, though it had been designed with the ability to carry astronauts in mind. The Skylon was a genuine advancement - and as it had the potential to massively drop the price of getting a payload into space. The company's tests proved that it was possible, and this earned them in 2017 a $464 million lump of funding from DARPA and the assistance of Lockheed Martin's famed "Skunk Works" to make it fly. Reaction Engines and Lockheed Martin built the spacecraft in an amazingly short period of time, and on September 17, 2018, the Skylon flew from the first time at Reaction Engines' facility near Atsion, New Jersey, thought it flew in the middle of the night and without huge fanfare as the project was still in the development stages. It was not until July 4, 2019, when the Skylon was out in an airshow for Independence Day in New York City, the remotely-controlled Skylon flown in that case from a specially-modified Learjet 60XR with the control equipment installed. The Skylon made its first operational flight for Reaction Space Transport to deliver three commercial communications satellites on September 26, 2019, originally from Cape Canaveral, though later flights would fly off from different places. True to form, the Skylon design spawned imitators in the 2020s, as it made it possible for space to now be much be closer to the reach of smaller nations and companies alike, and it also made for the advancement of new satellites and satellite operators, and after a 2022 law passed almost simultaneously in Washington and Brussels, a requirement by satellite launchers to recover older satellites and a NASA/ESA/JAXA/CSA program to clean up the large amount of space junk revolving around the Earth, in order to make it safer for the growing number of launches into space.
An image of the Reaction Engines Skylon A1 with an open payload bay
The world was now starting to catch up with the developed world, and it was soon apparent that the world would indeed change greatly in the 21st Century. The world's need for personal transportation was growing ever bigger, as was its need to move people and goods. The Motor City was up to that challenge, not just in America, but worldwide....
TBC...
