Last moth (November ‘07) Clive Thompson in Fast Company profiled an auto mechanic from Wichita, Kansas, Johnathan Goodwin, and wondered, “has this guy in far-off Kansas figured out the way to save Detroit?”
I keep returning to the article because in many ways I feel like it’s a perfect summary for the state of affairs we find ourselves in as a nation. And of course, it’s the story of a local boy made good.
I’m also surprised it didn’t get more coverage in the blogosphere — it’s truly a mind-blowing article. At it’s best, it’s the story of a man who started with nothing, at 13 forced to seek work in auto shops to help pay the family bills. Along the way he acquires an unrelenting need to experiment as well as to push the boundaries of what is mechanically possible. He creates his own tools when necessary, including what he calls ‘the McGuyver,’ a tool Thompson describes as, “an octopuslike tangle of wires” used to disable the Hummer’s legendary security meant to prevent exactly what he does — switch out engines and transmissions.
Now in his 30’s, Goodwin’s the man responsible for some of the most high-profile eco-conversions in the nation, including the Governator’s Hummer and Neil Young’s 1960 Lincoln Continental. He was also chosen to head-up a conversion team for the 2007 Earth Day eco-edition of MTV’s Pimp My Ride [available online].
Along the way he’s always searching, discovering, for instance, the work of German engineer Uli Kruger, who has experimented with injecting hydrogen directly into a combustion engine to boost both performance and efficiency. Goodwin has now adapted the same technology.
The article’s contradictions are amazing: Goodwin’s love of Hummers and performance against his intense drive to reduce emissions and dependence on foreign oil; one guy using GM’s own parts to disprove their claims that this isn’t possible (90% of the products Goodwin uses are GM’s own, including the stock diesel engine and transmission); a country so driven by innovation finds one of it’s most celebrated industries, the industry it alone invented and perfected, decayed, stagnant and averse to the realities of the new century.
“They could do all this stuff if they wanted to,” he tells me [Thompson], slapping on a visor and hunching over an arc welder. “The technology has been there forever. They make 90% of the components I use.” He doesn’t have an engineering degree; he didn’t even go to high school: “I’ve just been messing around and seeing what I can do.”
What he’s done to a Hummer is this: taken Kruger’s technology and mashed it up with his own diesel conversion. By adding a tank of hydrogen in the back (which lasts up to 700 miles), diesel consumption is cut in half and horsepower is doubled. Emissions are cut. And according to Goodwin, you can feed the monster “… hydrogen, diesel, biodiesel, corn oil–pretty much anything but water.”
Two years ago, Goodwin got a rare chance to show off his tricks to some of the car industry’s most prominent engineers. He tells me the story: He was driving a converted H2 to the SEMA show, the nation’s biggest annual specialty automotive confab, and stopped en route at a Denver hotel. When he woke up in the morning, there were 20 people standing around his Hummer. Did I run over somebody? he wondered. As it turned out, they were engineers for GM, the Hummer’s manufacturer. They noticed that Goodwin’s H2 looked modified. “Does it have a diesel engine in it?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“No way,” they replied.
He opened the hood, “and they’re just all in and out and around the valves and checking it out,” he says. They asked to hear it run, sending a stab of fear through Goodwin. He’d filled it up with grease from a Chinese restaurant the day before and was worried that the cold morning might have solidified the fuel. But it started up on the first try and ran so quietly that at first they didn’t believe it was really on. “When you start a diesel engine up on vegetable oil,” Goodwin says, “you turn the key, and you hear nothing. Because of the lubricating power of the oil, it’s just so smooth. Whisper quiet. And they’re like, ‘Is it running? Yeah, you can hear the fan going.’”
One engineer turned and said, “GM said this wouldn’t work.”
“Well,” Goodwin replied, “here it is.”
For those of us not interested in Hummers, his company SAE Energy will be offering a $ 5,000 home conversion package in early 2008, something which seems to me both much more affordable and eco-conscious than buying a new Prius. The products page says it will allow any turbocharged diesel vehicle to burn 50% less fuel and produce 80% less emissions.
I’m wondering why this guy isn’t more of a hero to the Green movement? I think once his products are widely available, this will change. Watching the food-chain on this one (The Earth Day MTV special, then an article in Biodiesel Magazine, then the Fast Company article) I think wide-scale publicity and acknowledgement can’t be far away.
“Everybody should be driving a plug-in vehicle right now,” he complains, in one of his laconic engineering lectures, as we wander through the blistering Kansas heat to a nearby Mexican restaurant. “I can go next door to Ace Hardware and buy a DC electric motor, go out to my four-wheel-drive truck, remove the transmission and engine, bolt the electric motor onto the back of the transfer case, put a series of lead-acid batteries up to 240 volts in the back of the bed, and we’re good to go. I guarantee you I could drive all around town and do whatever I need, go home at night, and hook up a couple of battery chargers, plug one into an outlet, and be good to go the next day.
“Detroit could do all this stuff overnight if it wanted to,” he adds.
And this is what I keep coming back to: over and over, Detroit’s plight seems to mirror our Nation’s. A failure of leadership — of vision — so profound and inexplicable that it boggles. A nation of such potential stuck watching the same reruns (political, business, entertainment…) over and over. Amusing ourselves, as someone has said, to death.
Our only hope is in our legendary ability to innovate. Goodwin shows us that not only is it possible, but people are out there doing it. Even if you haven’t heard of them yet.
Props to Pimp My Ride for breaking this one into the media spotlight.
Photo from fastcompany.com
Goodwin appearing on Media Talk:
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[...] (retroactively) in this series is my post on Jonathan Goodwin, next up is David Blume, and his book Alcohol Can Be A Gas!. For alcohol here, read [...]
Positivity: Alcohol Can Be A Gas! | TheSacredWeb (space) shared this on Jul 23 08 at 11:44 amCharlie Peters shared this on Jun 01 08 at 9:56 pmWhat was the cause of death of Alexander Farrell, 46, expert on alternative fuels?
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/18/BAOK1087DP.DTL
