Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Nissan has unveiled a new roll-on/roll-off car carrier that promises to save more fuel than any vehicle on board possibly could.

Used in Japan to deliver cars domestically to the ports of Yokohama, Kobe and Kyushu, the Nichioh Maru roll-on/roll-off (RoRo) is the length of one and a half football fields and can carry 1,380 cars. Such carriers are common in Europe, and are beginning to gain traction in the US.

During the four years it took to build, it’s been outfitted with a number of fuel-saving features that reduce CO2 emissions by 18 percent over a conventional RoRo.

On the carrier’s deck are 281 solar panels that power on-board amenities including LED lights in the ship’s hold and crew areas. The ship also features a low-friction coating on its hull that improves the fuel mileage it can achieve on the sea. Nissan estimates those efficiencies would save up to thirteen tons of fuel for each round trip. For those thirteen tons, what do you get?

We’ll spare you the math, but assuming that the average grade of diesel has a density of 0.85kg/L, each round trip saves about 4,000 gallons of fuel. That’s the equivalent of 100,000 miles in an oil-burner that gets 25 mpg. For the average American, each round trip the RoRo makes equals about eight years of driving. Considering that the ship makes two round trips a week, it’s like taking 104 cars off the road.

“As Nissan went to the effort to launch the Nissan Leaf at that time, in terms of the logistical flow, we thought there would be a way for us to contribute using state-of-the-art technologies,” said Tomohiko Uchiyama, president of Nitto Kaiun Corporation, the ship’s operator.

Even if there’s an all-electric Leaf on board, it couldn’t match the fuel savings of the Nichioh Maru herself.

 Photo/Video: Nissan

For all the heat they take from critics, automakers have done a remarkable job increasing the efficiency of automotive drivetrains. Technological advancements like turbocharging, direct injection, variable timing and dual-clutch transmissions with seven or more gears have helped squeeze more miles from every gallon of gas.

There’s just one problem: These engines are powering ever heavier, ever more powerful automobiles. As a result, the technological advancements of the past 30 years have brought only small gains in real-world fuel economy, says MIT economist Christopher Knittel.

This would seem to go without saying, as anyone who’s driven, say, the 556-horsepower Cadillac CTS-V can attest. But Knittel’s quantified the problem. His research found the average fuel economy of automobiles sold in the United States rose a little more than 15 percent between 1980 and 2006. But the average curb weight of those vehicles climbed 26 percent and horsepower jumped 107 percent in the same time.

“Most of that technological progress has gone into compensating for weight and horsepower,” Knittel said in a statement.

All factors being equal, fuel economy increased 60 percent in that time, Knittel notes in “Automobiles on Steroids,” published in American Economic Review. If we were driving cars that featured today’s drivetrain tech but had the weight and power of vehicles in the Reagan era, the average fuel economy of the American fleet would have climbed from 23 mpg in 1980 to roughly 37 mpg today. That’s 10 mpg better than the current average, and 1.5 mpg better than the goal the Obama administration has set for 2016.

These are not insignificant figures, given that the transportation sector accounts for 30 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Knittel reviewed data from the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, auto manufacturers and trade journals. His research found that light trucks (which include SUVs) represented about 20 percent of passenger vehicles sold in the United States in 1980. That figure had climbed to 51 percent by 2004.

“I find little fault with the auto manufacturers, because there has been no incentive to put technologies into overall fuel economy,” Knittel says. “Firms are going to give consumers what they want, and if gas prices are low, consumers are going to want big, fast cars.”

Between 1980 and 2004, gas prices dropped by 30 percent when adjusted for inflation. Knittel makes that point before stepping firmly onto the third rail of transportation policy by suggesting the best way to curb automotive emissions is to raise the gas tax.

“When it comes to climate change, leaving the market alone isn’t going to lead to the efficient outcome,” Knittel says. “The right starting point is a gas tax.”

Before you prepare to burn the man in effigy, you might do well to recall that the federal gas tax stands at 18.4 cents per gallon and has not been raised since 1993. (It also is not indexed for inflation.) As of January 2011, all taxes on gasoline averaged 48.1 cents per gallon.

The only way to foster true change, Knittel argues, is to change our policies. It is incumbent upon the government to “create a structure that leads to these technologies being put toward fuel economy,” Knittel says.

To that end, the Obama administration has raised the Corporate Average Fuel Economy of cars and trucks to 35.5 mpg by 2016 and 54.5 mpg by 2025. Knittel says automakers could meet those benchmarks by simply maintaining the rate of technological innovation seen since 1980 while also reducing by 25 percent the weight and horsepower of the average vehicle.

That’s an important point, as it challenges the industry’s well-worn argument that meeting tougher fuel economy standards poses a technological challenge.

“For a long time automakers argued that they did not have the technology to boost fuel economy, but they kept proving themselves wrong by putting it in our cars year after year, just for performance and weight instead of fuel economy,” said David Friedman, deputy director of the clean vehicles program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “As a result, a family car today delivers the performance of a muscle car from the 60s.”

Now, Friedman says, it is time for automakers to shift their focus to making vehicles more efficient for the sake of overall efficiency, not performance. We can do so, he says, without sacrificing weight or performance.

“For the past 25 years, fuel efficiency technology has gone into boosting performance and vehicle size,” he says. “Now we need to put at least the next 25 years of fuel efficiency technology into saving consumers money at the pump through higher fuel economy.”

We’re already seeing this, as automakers pare weight from their vehicles and downsize the engines they’re putting in them. Six-cylinders are replacing eights, while fours are replacing sixes, without severely impacting performance. We’re even seeing wee little three-cylinder engines that perform like larger four-bangers.

Knittel goes even further, saying we could see a fleet-wide average of 52 mpg within eight years if automakers built cars of the same weight and power we saw in 1980. That, however, does not seem likely in a nation so fat that Fiat had to revamp the interior of the diminutive Fiat 500 so we might actually fit inside. We, as a nation, also seem utterly convinced that tiny cars are deathtraps and we absolutely need at least 300 horsepower for running to CostCo.

Still, there are some in the auto industry picking up what Knittel is laying down. Legendary Formula 1 designer Gordan Murray, for example, has long argued that radically cutting the size and weight of our cars is the fastest, easiest and cheapest way to reduce fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. The innovative manufacturing method he’s devised to do just that is getting attention from automakers.

Yet Knittel remains skeptical that tighter CAFE regulations will, by themselves, have the same impact as a tax hike. Raising the fuel economy rules will actually make it cheaper to drive, which means people will drive even more — and therefore consume more fuel. If we truly want to put a dent in greenhouse gas emissions, he argues, raising the gas tax is the way to go. Only then will consumers demand more efficient cars and use less fuel.

Photo: matt-hurst/Flickr

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen raised a lot of eyebrows with his plan to build the largest airplane ever, then use it to launch rockets into space. But as wild as the idea of a six-engine airplane carrying a multi-stage rocket may be, it is evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Air-launched rockets have been around for more than 60 years, and airplanes have been launching payloads into orbit since the 1990s. Even Burt Rutan, the legendary aerospace designer working with Allen on Stratolaunch Systems, has a history with the technique. He designed the wing for an air launched rocket back in the 1980s as well as SpaceShipOne and its mother ship White Knight winning the X-Prize in 2004.

The only difference is the scale. Stratolaunch is taking air launches to a whole new level.

Allen and Rutan have proposed building an aircraft that features six Boeing 747 engines and a wingspan of 385 feet — more than 120 feet wider than an Airbus A380, currently the largest commercial passenger plane in service. It’s nearly 100 feet more wingspan than the Antonov An-225, the world’s largest airplane. The airplane will have a gross weight of 1.2 million pounds, including a 490,000-pound booster rocket being developed by SpaceX. The mothership will fly to an altitude of about 30,000 feet, then release the rocket. The aircraft will be designed and built by Scaled Composites.

Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, joins super-wealthy entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos in looking to the heavens for his next venture, as NASA turns to the private sector for help getting to space.

Stratolaunch is easily among the most ambitious proposals. But the idea behind it dates to the early days of aviation, when airships launched biplane fighters toward the end of World War I.

Then, as now, the idea was to maximize range, or payload, while minimizing the amount of fuel needed for a mission. In the earliest days of aviation, airplanes simply could not carry enough fuel for long flights in battle. These days, it’s about needing less fuel and optimizing a design for delivering a payload to orbit.

One of the biggest challenges to putting things into low earth orbit is the amount of energy required to get there. The International Space Station orbits around 200 to 250 miles above the earth. Like the small biplanes of the early 20th century, a space vehicle would need less fuel for its mission if it could be carried even a small percentage of the way to orbit by the relatively more efficient aircraft. Expendable rockets require enormous amounts of fuel in order to put a relatively small payload into low earth orbit — the payload may be as little as 1 to 3.5 percent of the vehicle’s launch weight.

Carrying a rocket to high altitude means it needs less fuel, thereby saving weight and money. Much of the fuel needed to launch a rocket is needed just to get above the dense lower levels of the atmosphere. At 30,000 feet more than half of the density of the atmosphere would be below the rocket. Beyond saving fuel, air-launching a rocket allows engineers to design more efficient rocket nozzles because they’re operating in the thinner parts of the atmosphere.

There also is a slight reduction in gravitational force at higher altitudes, and some of the velocity needed to achieve orbit is provided by the launch vehicle’s forward motion.

Granted, many of the benefits offered by air-launched vehicles are small, but they add up. As a result, getting into orbit is a little easier, and cheaper when you make an airplane the first stage of a multi-stage system to deliver payloads into orbit.

Another big advantage of using an airplane as a launch platform is the ability to launch from almost anywhere. There is no need to build a specialized, and expensive, launch facility with launch pads and other equipment familiar to anyone who’s seen Cape Canaveral. This makes it easier to take advantage of weather or optimal launch sites, such as equatorial locations that can further reduce the energy needed to achieve orbit.

Here, too, Allen and Rutan are looking to the past in building Stratolaunch.

From the earliest days of rocket-powered aviation, the goals have been top speed and highest altitude. To avoid having to carry the extra fuel (aka, weight) needed to achieve the altitude needed for test flights at the dawn of the rocket age, experimental rocket aircraft were carried aloft by larger airplanes. On October 14, 1947 a rocket-powered airplane carried by a Boeing B-29 bomber made history when Chuck Yeager flew the Bell X-1 beyond the speed of sound. Air-launched rockets allowed test pilots to inch their way toward space through the 1940s and 1950s.

By the late 1960s, NASA and the U.S. Air Force were collaborating on the X-15. The X-15 made multiple air-launched flights to sub-orbital space and pushed the boundaries of hypersonic flight. But when the X-15 program ended in 1969, so to did the idea of air-launched vehicles. The Saturn V and Soyuz rockets took over the duties of reaching space, joined later by the Space Shuttle.

During the 1980s, Dr. Antonio Elias began working on a new air launched space vehicle that could use an airliner as its launch platform. The Pegasus rocket was tested in 1990 by the same NASA Boeing B-52, “Balls 8,” that carried the X-15. Pegasus, featuring a delta wing designed by Rutan, could deliver a relatively small payload of about 1,000 pounds to low earth orbit. Once testing was finished, Orbital Sciences used a former Air Canada Lockheed L-1011 to carry Pegasus to altitude and launch it into orbit.

Orbital Sciences’ Lockheed L-1011 drops the Pegasus rocket on an orbital mission.

The L-1011 has flown 33 missions with the Pegasus rockets (the first seven were flown with the B-52). After a few launch failures early on, the system has a perfect record since 1996. It has delivered more than 80 satellites to orbit.

Even now, Allen isn’t alone in pursuing the idea.

DARPA is investigating the possibility of using an off-the-shelf airplane to deliver small payloads to orbit. The idea is to make it far cheaper to put a 100 pound payload in space using something as small as a business jet or fighter jet as the launch platform.

There have been several other ideas over the years, including Boeing’s Air Launch which was to use a 747 as the carrier aircraft. A British concept called Interim HOTOL would use Antonov An-225, currently the world’s largest aircraft, as the carrier aircraft by adding two more engines for a total of eight. There even have been studies looking into the possibility of towing a spacecraft like a glider or even carrying a rocket in the cargo hold of an airplane and pushing it out the back.

But Virgin Galactic may have the most high-profile air-launch. The Scaled Composites follow on to Rutan’s SpaceShipOne is SpaceShipTwo, a sub-orbital spacecraft similar in concept to the X-15.

This time around, Scaled Composites and Rutan are thinking even bigger. In classic Rutan style, Stratolaunch will use engines, landing gear, cockpit items and other parts from a pair of used Boeing 747s it has purchased in order to reduce development costs.

Designed by engineers at Scaled Composites, the massive Stratolaunch carrier aircraft will have a range of 1,300 miles. This will give it some flexibility in being able to take off from different airports around the world and flying to a safe location for launch. That said, the fact it will need a 12,000-foot runway will limit the number of airports able to accommodate the giant.

The booster rocket is based on the Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX. Once released at approximately 30,000 feet, the rocket will use a two stage booster to deliver a payload of up to 13,500 pounds to low earth orbit.

First flights for the Stratolaunch system are scheduled for 2016.

Images: Stratolaunch, NASA

Sometime in the future, Apple devices such as the iPhone, iPad and MacBook might work longer than ever on a smaller and lighter battery pack. How is this possible? By using hydrogen fuel cells, which convert oxygen and hydrogen into water, heat and electricity.

The US Patent & Trademark Office has recently published two Apple patent applications, detailing how fuel cells might power smartphones, laptops and tablets of the future.

Hydrogen fuel cells aren’t exactly a new technology; they’ve been used to power Honda cars, for example, and they bring their own set of problems, especially in the context of smartphones or laptops. “It is extremely challenging to design hydrogen fuel cell systems which are sufficiently portable and cost-effective to be used with portable electronic devices,” admits Apple.

But Apple might have a solution. One of the patent applications describes a “fuel cell system which is capable of both providing power to and receiving power from a rechargeable battery in a portable computing device. This eliminates the need for a bulky and heavy battery within the fuel cell system, which can significantly reduce the size, weight and cost of the fuel cell system.”

And for how long these fuel cells (in its patent application, Apple explores other fuel possibilities besides hydrogen) could power a smartphone or a laptop? The answer is “days or even weeks without refueling,” according to Apple. This sounds like a dream to owners of most modern smartphones, which barely last a day of heavy use.

We’ll probably have to wait a while until fuel cell-powered iPhones and MacBooks hit the market, but a big breakthrough in battery technology is something we’ve been waiting for a long time, and it might change the face of the market forever.

 

SOMEWHERE OVER MONTANA — I’m sitting aboard a Boeing 737-800 burning a biofuel blend, en route to Washington, D.C. It’s the first of what Alaska Airlines says will be 75 flights made with biofuel during the next month.

Perhaps the most exciting part of the flight is that it isn’t that exciting. The 20 percent biofuel blend fueling the turbofan engines burns just like conventional jet fuel. It’s no different for the pilots or the passengers, for whom it’s just another flight to D.C. And for Alaska Airlines, the ho-hum nature of the flight is one of the big points the company is trying to make.

There have been many biofuel demonstration flights during the past few years, with everything from fighter jets to 747s burning the stuff. But they’ve typically been demonstration flights without passengers. That’s changing as airlines begin regularly scheduled flights. Lufthansa has flown several flights in Europe using a biofuel blend, and United Airlines made a biofuel passenger flight Monday, a first for a domestic carrier.

But Alaska is taking a bigger step into alt-fuels with a plan to make 75 biofuel-powered flights this month. The company wanted to go beyond demonstration flights to show the fuel can be used right now, without any issues or challenges. The biofuel is produced by Dynamic Fuels in Louisiana using feedstock derived from used cooking oil and the byproducts from meat production. The biofuel meets the exact same standards as normal jet fuel.

“It’s chemically indistinguishable from Jet A,” Alaska Airlines VP Keith Loveless said at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport before the flight departed. “It’s just the feedstock that differs.”

El Al Israel Airlines will convert many of its Boeing 737s to hybrid power, using electricity to move planes on the tarmac. The move will save fuel, cut emissions and reduce the time spent waiting for a tug to tow airplanes to and from the gate.

The airline plans to outfit the aircraft with WheelTug electric motors that drive the nose gear using energy from the plane’s auxiliary power unit. Beyond eliminating the need to fire up the jets to taxi, WheelTug says the device can eliminate the potential bottleneck that comes with waiting for a tug.

By using the APU instead of the main engines to taxi, a 737 operator can cut fuel use during ground operations by 85 percent, according to the company. The amount of fuel used on the ground is but a fraction of what’s burned during flight, but the benefits can add up for airlines looking to save every possible dollar.

WheelTug chief pilot Joseph Goldman says a typical Boeing 737NG burns around two gallons a minute while taxiing with just one engine. That fuel can be saved by drawing power from the APU, which is running anyhow. In addition to burning less fuel, the electric propulsion means the plane can carry less fuel, saving weight — and further reducing fuel consumption.

“Even if taxi-out is officially expected to take 15 minutes,” Goldman said in a statement, “I may plan for 45 minutes to cover an unplanned shutdown.”

WheelTug estimates several hundred dollars can be saved on every flight.

The twin electric motors and accessories installed on the nose gear weigh about 300 pounds. WheelTug says the system is weight neutral because it is offset by the ability to carry less fuel. Using the motors, the pilot can taxi at speeds up to 28 miles per hour.

Several companies are exploring similar ideas to eliminate the need to run the large main engines on the ground. WheelTug is the first to announce a launch customer with a device that can be retrofitted to existing aircraft without installing external power supplies or resources.

Beyond the fuel savings, airlines can reduce delays by eliminating the need to rely on tugs. Delays mean lost revenue, so it provides airlines with another way to cut costs and increase the bottom line. The electric drive also reduces the chance of an engine being damaged by ingesting debris, something that most often happens on the ground.

WheelTug hopes to have the system certified by 2013. It also is developing a version for the Airbus A320 series. El Al Airlines hopes to equip 20 of its 737s with the system upon certification.

Photos: Drewski2112/Flickr, WheelTug

Just when it looked like the saga of the new 747-8 freighter was behind them, Boeing has been handed another setback. Launch customer Cargolux decided not to show up to take delivery of the first plane this week. The Luxembourg based company notified the plane maker on Friday that the big ceremony that had been planned to celebrate the newest 747 entering service was not going to happen and it was rejecting the first two airplanes.

And it all comes down to fuel efficiency. Well on the surface that’s what it comes down to, but Qatar Airways new investment in Cargolux might point to a bit more twisted battle involving Boeing’s other new airplane, the 787 Dreamliner.

The 747-8 freighter made its first flight back in February of 2010 and like Boeing’s other new airplane, it has suffered a few setbacks since then. But with the flight testing complete and the first two airplanes out of the paint shop, Boeing was ready to start delivering the new freighters this week. In fact Cargolux had planned on taking delivery on Monday at Paine Field where the airplanes are made, and making the short 30 mile flight to Sea-Tac airport south of Seattle and begin hauling freight the next day.

Instead the two 747-8s with Cargolux paint jobs still sit outside the factory at Paine Field north of Seattle and the freight operator and Boeing are negotiating over how much being a little less fuel efficient than initially promised is worth.

Boeing announced to customers many months ago that the 747-8F wasn’t quite going to meet the fuel burn goals that had been set out at the beginning of the program. According to Aviation Week & Space Technology, the freighter is 2.7 percent off the projected fuel efficiency. It’s not uncommon for the first several airplanes off of a new assembly line to miss projected performance figures. But the customers and the manufacturer usually come to an agreement long before the handing over of the keys. And yes, there is a ceremonial handing over of the keys, even though they aren’t actually used to start the airplane.

Boeing and engine maker General Electric are working improvements to the new airplane they claim will makeup 1.6 percent of the efficiency shortfall. But the improved efficiency will not be available until 2013.

The last minute rejection of the new 747-8s is likely influenced by Cargolux’s newest stake holder, Qatar Airways. A deal that was put together months ago, Qatar Airways 35 percent stake in Cargolux was finalized on September 11. And according to Flightglobal, there might be some sour grapes between Qatar Airways and Boeing over the 30 787s the airline has on order.

Meanwhile, Boeing is still going full steam ahead with the delivery ceremony for the first 787 to launch customer All Nippon Airways this coming Monday. ANA will be taking delivery of its first airplane and is expecting to fly customers some time next month.

Photo: Boeing

A new study from the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) has determined the precise effects of vehicle selection, maintenance and driving style on an individual driver’s fuel economy. The results? No matter what you drive, your car can be a gas guzzler.

Not surprisingly, choosing a fuel-efficient vehicle has the biggest single impact on how many miles per gallon a driver can get. Whether you buy a gas guzzler or fuel miser accounts for 28 percent of your individual fuel economy, regardless of how you drive or how the vehicle is equipped. It gives credence to policies that encourage car buyers to choose efficient vehicles, as real-world mileage can only vary so much from the number on the window sticker.

Cumulatively, however, individual choices that a driver makes with an existing vehicle can make a Chevy Cruze’s mileage match a Suburban.

Study authors Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle examined the effects of a driver’s decisions on a hypothetical high-mileage car, one so neglected by its owner that it’s out of tune with low tires, the throttle pushed to the limit after every stop sign and the trunk full of scrap metal. In such a state, that poor car’s mileage could decrease by about half.

“Following the remaining best eco-driving practices will result in no change in fuel economy for the car that gets 11 mpg,” Sivak and Schoettle wrote. “By contrast, the car that nominally gets 36 mpg will experience a reduction to 19.8 mpg in actual fuel economy.”

Many of the authors’ recommendations read like one of those “improve your fuel economy” pieces that local news stations run every time gas prices start to go up: Keep your engine tuned and your tires properly inflated. Don’t speed, don’t drive aggressively and clean heavy debris out of your trunk.

However, the authors also calculated exactly how route planning can affect mileage. Commutes that avoid hills and congestion can affect mileage by up to 40 percent. As navigation systems begin to better detect traffic patterns and road topography, the Michigan research could be used to instantly calculate the estimated fuel economy for different routes, letting the driver take into account the cost of a journey.

See Also:

• Cars Don’t Waste Fuel. Drivers Waste Fuel
• Aussie Hypermilers Set Mileage Record
• Three Is The New Four As Engines Downsize

Photo: Flickr/M.Markus

Solutions to modern problems sometimes can be found in a distinctly classical place. The Magnolia Special was built to recapture the grace and romance of 1930s European roadsters — internal combustion and all — yet it emits 40 percent less CO2 than an equally powerful gas-burning automobile. And it does this using technology as old as internal combustion itself.

The Magnolia Special is the first bespoke, hand-built car built specifically to run on compressed natural gas. If nothing else, it proves eco-friendly need not mean boring.

“I really don’t think that environmentalists are worth a damn as car designers,” says J.T. Nesbitt, who designed and built the Magnolia Special. “They just lack passion. If the problem of global warming is left only to them, our cars are really going to suck.”

Nesbitt is a talented and passionate motorcycle designer strongly influenced by his adopted home of New Orleans. You may have seen his work ridden by Ewan McGregor in The Island. His representation of the arc of a whip, realized in a carbon fiber frame and fuel tank, created a motorcycle that perfectly fit into a high-tech future despite its old-school aesthetic.

Nesbitt is doing so again, this time for real, by capturing the beauty of the past in a vehicle relevant to the future.

Nesbitt started sketching the car in 2008. It’s his first take on an art-deco roadster theme. Think vintage Alfa Romeo or Jaguar and you won’t be far off. In fact, the car uses an engine based on Jaguar’s fabled 4.2-liter inline-six, the same one that powered the original E-Type. Nesbitt chose the engine because its torquey nature and strong internals work well with CNG. It also helps that the long, narrow engine looks great beneath the car’s louvered aluminum hood. It’s only making 200 horsepower, but with 300 pound-feet of torque, the performance won’t disappoint, particularly in a car that weighs just 2,700 pounds. That torque-to-weight ratio beats the Porsche 911.

“The Jaguar six only won Le Mans like what, five times?” Nesbitt says of the engine. “The 4.2 is such a great torque motor and CNG is really a torque fuel, so it’s a great pairing.”

Nesbitt says the octane rating equivalent for natural gas is 130, so the engine required specially forged high-compression 12.5:1 pistons and high-lift, short-duration camshafts.

“That setup allows the highly stable fuel to achieve complete combustion,” he says.

CNG is a popular conversion for fleet vehicles. But the gaseous fuel requires bulkier tanks than those designed for liquids. This presents a problem for automobiles, because the tank typically eats up a lot of space. By incorporating those tanks into Magnolia’s fundamental structure, Nesbitt made that drawback into an advantage: The tanks add torsional strength to the thin aluminum body. That’s a first in automobile design and construction, and a big part of what makes this vehicle so unique.

“The CNG storage tanks are really the only piece of high tech on this car,” Nesbitt says. “Everything else could have been made 100 years ago. They’re made from a carbon composite wrapped around an extruded aluminum core. The burst pressure is 4,800 PSI, but they’ll normally be filled to 3,600 PSI. They’re incredibly strong, yet very lightweight. I can actually pick one up and walk around the shop with it. That’s amazing.”

If CNG is cleaner than gasoline — the natural gas-burning Honda Civic GX is consistently ranked the greenest internal combustion car on the market — why isn’t CNG a more popular vehicle fuel? Nesbitt has a theory.

“In 1903, H. Nelson Jackson drove from coast to coast, cementing gasoline as the fuel that would power the automobile for the next century. You have to understand that back then there were gasoline cars, steam cars and electric cars, and no one was sure which would prove to be the standard. Jackson proved the viability of gasoline with his record-setting trek, and the rest is history.”

“I think that a true test of an alternative fuel now, just as then, must be endurance,” he adds.

With that in mind, Nesbitt and his friend Max Materne, who helped with the electrical engineering of the car, plan to drive the Magnolia Special from New Orleans to New York to Los Angeles this fall. He plans to prove the fuel’s viability and raise awareness of CNG along the way.

Magnolia’s 700-mile range — the equivalent of 30 gasoline gallons — will help, but finding CNG isn’t that hard. There are CNG filling stations coast-to-coast, and the average cost is 85 cents a gallon. If you have a natural-gas line at home, such as for your stove, you can even buy a converter to make your own CNG.

“Kinda cool to have your vehicle’s fuel bill show up every month on your utilities bill,” says Nesbitt, who fills up the car in his French Quarter studio.

So what’s a motorcycle designer, land-speed record racer and gasoline-fueled hedonist doing worrying about the environment? Hurricane Katrina awakened him to the need to address the causes of global warming.

“Magnolia stems from that concern, but satisfies my passion for real cars, too,” he says.

And make no mistake, this is a real car. Nesbitt built the boxed steel chassis himself. Then he called in Tim George, a renowned Porsche race engine builder, scooter racer and furniture builder from Denver, to help hand-form the aluminum body.

Despite the classic design, Magnolia benefits from thoroughly modern suspension. Up front you’ll find pushrod-actuated inboard coil-over shocks and rack-and-pinion steering. At the rear is a four-link suspension with adjustable shocks. Disc brakes are used on all four wheels.

A steel cage encases the passenger compartment for safety and the underside is sheathed in aluminum to increase aerodynamic efficiency. All the bodywork is easily removed via brass fasteners, making repairs a snap.

No detail has been left untouched. Just look at the steering wheel, sheathed in hand-tooled leather, and the gorgeous hand-turned aluminum dashboard. Another feature you don’t typically find in environmentally friendly cars: a five-speed transmission and posi-traction rear differential.

“Just think about how many custom cars get built in this country every year,” Nesbitt says. “All of that talent, effort and money. What if some of that were harnessed to solve greater problems? It seems like the guys who build cars are inherent problem-solvers and a truly underutilized resource in this country. Simply put, no one’s ever asked them to sit down and work on something like this.”

“We’ve all been sold this idea that to be green we have to be high-tech,” he adds. “I reject that notion. Now, I am not a technophobe, but you’ve got to concede that the future is not going to be a videogame. Things will still be mechanical, people will still work with their hands. There will always be room for craftsmen. I know that a digital wristwatch keeps better time than a wind-up equivalent, but there’s very little romantic connection to them. Electric cars may represent a piece of the environmental puzzle, but I have a hard time getting excited about electrons flowing through circuit boards. I like camshafts and pistons and valves. I like things that make a wonderful noise. CNG satisfies my love for that animation without the guilt of damaging the environment to such a significant degree.”

Nesbitt isn’t driven by profit, but passion. He has no plans to commercialize Magnolia.

“For now, the object is to have fun,” he explains. “I just want to be a part of the solution and make beautiful things in the process.”

Photos: Amy Jett Photography, New Orleans

The CNG tanks provide additional rigidity to the hand-formed aluminum body.

The Magnolia Special is replete with gorgeous details.