Backstory: Breaking the gas ceiling

Next to her, Anna does her own equipment-forensics work. She surfs the Internet to track down a company to donate a hydrogen tank for the fuel-cell vehicle. Right now the car is only a welded aluminum frame, with no skin and no motor, sitting in the alley behind the lab. The human-powered vehicle is in pieces on a table. The biodiesel team awaits a rear axle.

Operating on a shoestring budget of about $500,000 donated by a dozen sponsors, Robyn and Anna are critical links, scroungers rounding up donated parts and buying the rest.

"I have two emergencies," Robyn says unflappably to Anna. "I need to find a welder and some important magnets that were supposed to arrive yesterday. Oh, and Ford [Motor Company] wants us to go talk to their 'alt-fuels' people and so does General Motors – at the same time."

Earlier, the emergency was finding a fuel cell. Of six companies contacted, none wanted to donate a million-dollar piece of technology on short notice. Finally, Anna found a high school science teacher in Rhode Island who agreed to loan one. On a morning inspection tour, Robyn tells Saphir Faid, a student from Belgium who manages the fuel-cell team, that a hydrogen tank will arrive soon. But that's the least of his problems. "We will have to work night and day to finish," says Saphir of a deadline two weeks off.

Nearby, the biofuels team celebrates the emergence of its carbon-fiber shell from a mold. It looks like a manatee on blocks. One team member, Eric Ellenoff, asks Robyn how to remove epoxy resin from his hair.

For all their long nights and endless buffets of pizza and Mountain Dew, the students find the challenge stimulating. The mood is a mixture of idealism and youthful hubris. "The most amazing thing is that we are making something nobody else has done," says Oscar Terrer, a diesel-engine expert from Spain.

Matthew Franking, a student at Principia College in Elsah, Ill., works on the electrical system of the "fish" with Craig George, an engineer from the University of Missouri at Rolla. Hunched over laptops, they confer about software to control the wiring. "I love this stuff," says Matthew.

"If I wasn't doing this, my summer job was selling toilet paper dispensers," adds Craig.

Back in the office, Matthew Ritter from the Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Mass., is eating SpaghettiOs straight from the can. He calls the project the experience of a lifetime. "The tight deadline has been difficult for everyone," he says. "But I can't think of a better way to spend the summer. There are a lot of problems in life, and we're getting a little traction on one of them."

***

Just days before the Aug. 13 deadline, anxiety runs high. Chris Pentacoff, of MIT, slumps near the all-electric car, answering questions about the bullet-shaped model at a public unveiling.

On one level, the student engineers have triumphed. Eight weeks after the students began their quixotic quest, all four vehicles run, though some are more road-worthy at this point than others. To prove it, three of the teams tested their cars on the rabbit-warren roads around MIT the night before – at 4 a.m. The fuel-cell team got so excited at one point that all 10 members piled on the car, rendering it immobile until two jumped off.

The big question – will the vehicles get 300 miles per gallon – will probably have to wait until road tests next spring. But, for now, the students are preparing to head home, secure that they have contributed at least something to helping the world survive the Oil Age.

Detroit, are you watching?

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