Hot Wiring the Electric Utopia

Hot Wiring the Electric Autopia

How one maverick inventor with a magical soldering iron might change the way we drive.

by Michael Shnayerson

Alan Cocconi, the renegade genius of electric vehicles, is stranded on the road. He has just called for help when I arrive at the offices of AC Propulsion, his storefront operation in the shopping mall town of San Dimas, California. Behind the town rise the San Gabriel Mountains, a stately rebuke too car culture. Cocconi is up in those mountains, it turns out. Earlier this morning, he took his converted Honda CRX for a spin up Mount Baldy, up the relentless hairpin curves that climb 7,000 feet to a view of the smog covered Los Angeles basin. You have to understand what a feat that is: The world's major car companies and scores of start-ups are building and testing electric vehicles (EVs) right now, and for all the progress they've made, it's a safe bet none can climb 7,000 feet the way Cocconi's car has, ride after ride. But for all his technological wizardry, there's one problem he has failed to anticipate, and so of course it has come to pass.

Flat Tire.

"This is a funny area back here," explains David Sivertsen from the passenger seat of my rental car as we drive to the rescue, circling up the mountain amid tall pines and spruce. 'They try to develop this area every generation or so, but the mountains won't let them."

Sivertsen, a tall and blonde-bearded engineering wonk, met Cocconi when the two were Cal Tech undergrads in the 1970s. Twenty-one months ago, he jumped at Cocconi's offer to join AC Propulsion as the fledgling company's third partner. Not everyone would have. The partners wouldn't be able to draw salaries until they found a company willing to manufacture their drivetrains under a licensing agreement. Now that has happened. A company called Magnetek has become the first licensee, and Sivertsen gets to buy groceries. More to the point, the deal means AC Propulsion will be self-supporting. In an industry that so far exists on corporate parents, wild-eyed inventors and federal grants, that's news.

"There he is."

Ahead on the roadside is a scruffy figure with tangled black hair and glasses askew, his flannel shirt worn, his jeans faded and ill-fitting, his sneakers scuffed and grungy, his car nowhere in sight. He looks more like a college student of two decades ago than an inventor whose name inspires awe among Big Three engineers. If he were a hitchhiker, you'd never pick him up.

Cocconi, I've been warned, is an impatient fellow. It shows in the, rapid-fire way he speaks, swallowing words in his haste to voice each next thought. He rattles on as we drive up a side road to find his test car, which is by a sheer, railless drop. The rear seats have been replaced by a metallic case containing twenty-one 12-volt, lead-acid batteries, each about the size of the battery in your car. Another case, with seven batteries, takes up the front-passenger foot well. The Honda's rebirth as an EV has added 1,000 pounds to its curb-side weight. Which would seem to complicate the task of jacking it up at the edge of a canyon precipice.

Mais non. As coolly as an Indy 500 pitman, Cocconi cranks up the car, pops off the flat and bolts on the tire we've brought. I clock him at under two minutes and note that for a brainy guy, he's got brawny forearms. "So," he says with a lopsided grin. "Want to drive?"

At 36, COCCONI isn't rich yet, and he isn't famous. But in the fast growing world of electric vehicles, he occupies a singular place.

He's the one who created the heart of the General Motors Impact prototype. Alone. On his own terms. Working in his garage. And then walked away from it all.

The Impact, should you somehow have missed the massive coverage it stirred over the last three years, is a sleek, very aero two-door sports car that does 0-60 in eight silent seconds. This summer, General Motors will send 30 of these cars - hand-built at a reported production cost of about $500,000 each - free to households in California for the first of a series of nationwide two to four-week trial drives.

This is a far cry from GM's hopes of putting factory-built Impacts into showrooms by now. But the Impact has already earned its ungainly name. It is still the car that provoked the Mandate- the stern California ruling that by 1998, 2 percent of all cars sold in the state must be emission-free, which at this stage means electric. It is still the car that launched a worldwide race in automotive technology as revolutionary as the advent of gas powered cars a century ago.

That race - and Cocconi's future - is now at a fascinating juncture. For the nearly four years that the mandate has been on the California books, engineers at the world's major car companies have struggled to solve the same problem that bedeviled EV dreamers as far back as the 1840s: the damnably short range of lead-acid batteries. They've built lighter cars and spent hundreds of millions of dollars on electric-power innovations. But new batteries always come with new problems.

The Impact, prince of the prototypes, still has a range of only 70 miles (per battery charge), a recharge time of at least three hours and a projected retail price, if it were to be mass-produced, of $30,000.

Late already for 1998 EV production, Detroit's Big Three have taken a hard look at their EV prospects and have issued a collective 'No way!" Their hope has been to coax Califomia's Air Resources Board into putting aside the mandate's EV clause at the board members biannual review in mid May, and to that end, the chairmen of the Big Three have made loud, moaning noises. By the time this story appears, the review will have taken place. Surprisingly, the Big Three seem likely to go unheard. Assuming the mandate is upheld - which now seems certain a reluctant race to production is definitely on. In fact, the vote could also affect 12 Eastern states whose governors, along with the mayor of the District of Columbia, voted earlier this year to adopt portions of the California mandate to meet their own clean air obligations. More EVs for sale in 1998 would mean at least a bit more economy of scale for Detroit in manufacturing them.

At the same time, breakthroughs in battery range and recharging time keep popping up. Two weeks after the Eastern states' vote, a small Georgia-based research-and-development outfit composed of several ex-Soviet scientists announced a new EV record: 831 miles traveled in 24 hours by a battery-packed pickup with monitoring equipment to keep recharging the battery en route, so that pit stops took no more than 20 minutes. That was with old-fashioned lead-acid batteries; other entrepreneurs are pouring millions of dollars into different chemical pairings that also work as batteries. A little more than a year after his downfall as chairman of GM, Robert Stempel has stunned the auto industry by joining the tiny Ovonic Battery Co., a firm in Troy, Michigan, that's breaking range records with batteries made of nickel and metal hydride.

So fevered is the pace of EV research that discoveries of this sort are being announced on an almost monthly basis, making it harder to argue for pushing the mandate aside. The catch is that years may pass before any of them can be mass-produced, but the threshold has been crossed: There's been too much invention in too many areas for changes not to occur more quickly.

Meanwhile, there are cars to see and touch, drive and buy. At the auto shows, dozens of EV-concept cars have been introduced by European and Japanese companies, with small-scale production plans declared by almost all of them. No need to wait, though: You can stroll into a North Hollywood store called Green Motor Works and pay $25,000 for a sporty EV conversion, its gas-engine guts pulled out and replaced by lead-acid batteries. For a bit less, start-ups like U.S. Electricar in California and Solectria in Massachusetts will sell you converted Big Three cars like the Geo Metro and Prizm. And then there's the Tropica, a Miata-like convertible. Sold by Renaissance Cars in Palm Bay, Florida, the Tropica has no top and offers a lead-acid range of just 38 miles, but at $12,500, who cares?

Cocconi, for one, says he's just a production line away from an EV with real range and real performance, at a realistic price. And if the Big Three say it can't be done, someone else will step up. The internal-combustion engine is quite simply doomed, a victim of its own extraordinary success - too many millions of cars, spewing too many billions of particles of harmful emissions. And while no one, including Cocconi, thinks electrics will replace gas cars the world over, no one any longer doubts that where electrics lead, the future will follow.

This is forward, this is neutral, and this is reverse." Cocconi indicates three buttons on his doctored dash. "there's no gear shift, of course. You just turn on the ignition key, and it comes on."

I do as I'm told, and the car begins to roll. It's eerie not to hear the comforting thrum of the motor kicking over. Instead, there's a menacing whine that rises as the car gathers speed. I've learned enough about EVs to know this is the sound of ordinary gears, audible without the muffling growl of an internal-combustion engine. It can be engineered out, as GM has shown with the latest Impacts, but Cocconi hasn't bothered to do this with his Honda. His focus is the drivetrain.

Trouble at the first curve. Instinctively, I step off the accelerator and tap the brake. Rather than slowing smoothly, the car almost comes to a halt. Ah, yes - the regenerative braking. Regen to the trade. Push the accelerator, and the batteries send a current to the motor that turns the wheels. Take your foot off, and the motor works in reverse, as a generator to send energy back to replenish the batteries. That slows the car and acts as a brake in itself.

Cocconi's car has the added element of variable regen: a slide control that lets you adjust the amount of regen you want, so that the car can be made to coast when you step off the accelerator, like a gas car, or provide such braking that it really does almost stop the car dead. Variable regen makes the car more efficient but it can also be dangerous if a driver forgets how much regen he has "dialed." For that reason, GM chose not to put variable regen on its spring fleet of hand-built Impacts. Which really irks Cocconi. 'They're so stuffy at GM they couldn't do anything different from a gas car," he exclaims. "Drivers would get used to it! They would learn!"

Jon Bereisa, chief engineer on the Impact program, knows all too well how Cocconi feels about GM. His own feelings about Cocconi, like those of many with whom the maverick has worked, are mixed. "Brilliant guy," he says. "He can visualize what he wants to create. He can see it in three dimensions. He can calculate that stuff on his kitchen table. And then machine things, because he has a Bridgeport lathe and a mill sitting there." It's like a concert pianist and composer building his own pianos.

At the same time, says Bereisa, Cocconi isn't the sort of maverick he most admires. 'There are some mavericks that corporate America is looking to find: people with some of those same skills yet who can exist in a corporate or governmental structure and still make a product. Alan's a closed-form solution unto himself. His role in life is to light candies under bushel baskets. But he doesn't give a shit about anything else. And if it weren't for Howard Wilson, Wally Rippel and Alec Brooks, in particular, all of Alan Cocconi's stuff would have just burned down the basket."

COCCONI'S ROLE IN THE EV story traces to the summer of 1988, when he and the other California engineers Bereisa mentions all persuaded General Motors to finance the manufacture of an electric-car prototype. This in itself was extraordinary. But then so were the players. The year before, they had created the Sunraycer, the GM sponsored winning entry in a 2,000-mile solar-car race across Australia. Wilson was a genial VP at Hughes Aircraft who thought an electric car might show synergy between Hughes and its new parent, GM. Brooks was the young engineer to whom Wilson turned to manage the project at AeroVironment, a small R&D firm in the San Gabriel Valley whose founder and presiding guru, Paul MacCready, has astounded the world with his winged creations for human-powered flight. Rippel was the guy who knew about motors from years of tinkering with EVs in his time off from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And then there was Cocconi, the free lance who knew Brooks and Rippel from Cal Tech and made SunRaycer's power electronics. But that was solar, and this was electric. Much in common, much entirely new.

Brooks played a leadership role in the 15-month "skunk works" that followed. But Cocconi was crucial. Without him, Rippel says flatly, "there would have been no Impact." It was Cocconi who built the inverter that transformed the lead-acid batteries DC current to AC for the new, more efficient motors that powered the car.

Working alone at home for more than a year, Cocconi designed the device that utilized 300 advanced semiconductor chips in an intricate array. "The most focused guy I've ever seen in my life," says Wilson. "Once he starts a project, he'll work night and day." First, on his computer, he designed the boards on which the chips were to sit. He had the boards produced, then hand-soldered the parts into place. "There were little control boards and circuit boards covered with components all over the place," recalls Bob Wragg, a Hughes engineer who later worked as GM's EV market-development man in California. "And every one of those parts had at least half a dozen connections, and every one of them was hand soldered." The inverter Cocconi came up with had 7,000 parts, weighed 61 pounds and delivered nearly 100 kilowatts of power - about 130 horsepower, which is more than many small gas cars.

"A lot of people took credit, but Cocconi did it," says Rippel. "He wrote specs; he didn't use somebody else's. And if he hadn't done that, the drive system would never have come together."

The Impact prototype was such a hit that three months after GM's then chairman Roger Smith unveiled it at the L.A. Auto Show on January 3, 1990, he announced production plans. It was such a hit that in September of that year, the California Air Resources Board came out with its mandate - a decision influenced directly by the Impact.

None of the world's EV prototypes would be developing at quite this pace and in quite this way without Cocconi's inverter - a briefcase shaped box produced in a nondescript ranch house in suburban Glendora.

Cocconi isn't thrilled by my request to see his home, but he can't seem to think of a good reason to refuse it. Having driven up Mount Baldy until the battery indicators tell us we're almost out of juice, we've come back down, recovering some 30 percent of the batteries' charge as we regen merrily along. Now the drive to neighboring Glendora is no sweat-hell, we could probably go 30 miles before we had to stop.

"The way other people buy clothes or furniture, I buy machines," Cocconi says by way of warning as we turn onto his street.

He's not kidding. A first clue that this is not an ordinary house are the yellowed supermarket flyers on the front stoop. Cocconi never goes in the front. He parks in back and immediately hooks the car up to a heavy 240 volt cord. The garage, which he shows me first, is packed with so much industrial equipment there's room for only one person to move about.

We enter the house by what would, perhaps, be the sun room. Now it's Cocconi's assembly room, with benches and computer parts scattered about. Adjacent to it is the electronics room, which has working computers and ceiling-high shelves of circuits and switches and capacitors and resistors. Cocconi hurries ahead of me to close his bedroom door. 'Too messy," he says with a sheepish grin. It can't be much messier than the living room, which actually has no furniture in it, just stuff strewn about: racing bikes against one wall, skis against another, books and CDs, like a college-dorm room, first day of fall term.

It's easier to appreciate, after seeing how utterly his work consumes his life, why Cocconi had trouble letting go of the car he helped create. GM's decision to put Impact into production was all the AeroVironment team could have hoped for. But it meant handing over the car - and control. Cocconi took it harder than the rest. "It started mushrooming into a huge corporate effort instead of the small coalition that originally built it," Cocconi says. "I found that a bit discouraging. Also, I realized there was no way they were going to have the car in production in 1992 like they said."

Cocconi agreed to teach Hughes Power Control Systems how to make his inverter and to teach GM's Delco Remy Division how to make the motor that he and Rippel had designed. Soon enough, Cocconi's bad-boy reputation spread. "He has absolute confidence in his own judgment and opinions," says Wragg, "and will act on them without regard for other people's opinions." MacCready puts it more gently. "He's quite impatient with other people's slowness," he says of Cocconi, "because each thing he really could do better than somebody else."

"Everyone admired him; we still do," says Hughes' Harry King, who headed up the team that began trying to understand just how Cocconi's inverter worked and how to interpret it for mass production. "But new guys would come on and they would ask him questions someone else had asked, and that would frustrate him, because he thought he had told Hughes already."

Cocconi gave Hughes his sketches, but to King's amazement, there were no formal drawings to show how the circuits had been designed. This was ... unprecedented. For the Hughes engineers, replicating Cocconi's circuits was a little like trying to copy a Charlie Parker jazz riff with bent notes and no sheet music.

With Cocconi's help, the Hughes engineers doggedly made more than 20 inverters by hand, then redesigned them for mass production. Another young engineer might have jumped at the chance to help bring the car to production at the GM Tech Center in Warren, Michigan the Harvard of the automotive industry. Not Cocconi. His aversion to GM had been instilled years before, at Cal Tech. For that, in a sense, he could thank Bereisa - the same GM engineer now adapting Cocconi's inverter for the Impact.

"I helped select him as a GM scholar out of Cal Tech," Bereisa explains. The program recruits a handful of the country's smartest engineering students to work at a GM facility for two college summers. Cocconi's first summer was spent under Bereisa at a Delco plant in Santa Barbara. From this, acknowledges Bereisa, the two developed a "mutual admiration at a distance. He probably thinks I sold my soul to the devil. Hell, I know he does. Corporate America!"

Cocconi recalls: "They treated me very nicely, and the work was quite interesting. That wasn't the problem. It was more the big-company environment."

One day, Cocconi simply walked into Brooks's office and announced he was leaving. He says he had no idea he would ever work on electric car technology again; he says he had no plans at all. "I spent about a month riding bicycles out in the desert and having fun," he says. 'Then I started thinking about what new components were out and what was possible now on electric vehicles. And I realized I was uniquely situated to develop a product better than GM could produce in the short term, with considerably lower manufacturing-component costs."

ADMITTEDLY, THE SAN DIMAS storefront office of AC Propulsion is more humble than the gigantic GM Tech Center with its thousands of Ph.D. engineers toiling in state-of-the-art labs and its massive resources to throw at new-car development. Not all of AC Propulsion's three partners and three employees can even sit in the office at once.

Here, atop work tables or standing upright, are tools of the trade, like a soldering station and a dynamometer that simulates road conditions for testing drivetrains. Because Cocconi funded the company himself putting in $250,000, which represents, he says, most of his savings as a consultant- he has had to be brutally resourceful. Many parts have been bought at surplus from downsizing aerospace firms. More than a few have been found in dumpsters. "There have been times," says Cocconi, "when all three partners of AC Propulsion were searching through the same dumpster at once."

When Cocconi began building his new inverter - alone, at home, as before - he was, in effect, competing with himself. Not only did he have to outdo his own work, he also had to avoid duplicating parts that Hughes and GM had patented. Indeed, Cocconi's first instinct when he finished his inverter was to get in touch with GM. "I hadn't designed the motor initially myself," he says. "I said to Bereisa,'If you let me use your motor technology and some of your facilities, you can have a free license agreement for my technology here, provided you agree to pay royalties if you do use it. "The answer I got was "Only if it's exclusive." At which point all dialogue with GM ceased."

GM wanted, as always, to own its technology - if not to create it, then to buy it. So Cocconi designed and built his own motor with some help from Rippel. When he was done, he bought a Honda CRX - the first new car of his life - ripped its guts out and installed his drivetrain,

AC Propulsion opened for business in March of 1992. Not long after, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) took Cocconi's CRX for a test ride and declared it better than the Impact: At an average speed of 51.5 mph on level freeways, it boasted a range of 131 miles and accelerated from 0-60 mph in eight seconds. GM's Impact - now in its second generation - had a range of only 120 miles. The impressive stats of Cocconi's CRX helped sell the partners' first hand-built drivetrain for $40,000 - to Honda. "We certainly offered it to American companies," Cocconi says. "Not many were interested, and being a small company, we can't afford to be picky."

That was the year of GM's terrible losses, of its management turned out and replaced amid boardroom drama and turmoil, so the automaker's December 7 decision to scuttle full-scale production plans for the Impact came almost as an anticlimax. If anything, the news hurt AC Propulsion too. Within days, Hughes had agreed to sell its Impact inverters to U.S. Electricar, which popped them into its conversion of Geo Prizms and the like.

Cocconi, angling for just that market, was too new a free lance to be taken seriously - even if he had invented the Hughes product. Hughes had the name; it also had the manufacturing capacity. With palpable bitterness, Cocconi says Hughes made too many compromises, that the inverters they are selling are underpowered. But GM's Wragg thinks Cocconi's inverters may have too much power. "Alan's goals are to the extreme of lightweight energy efficiency and performance," he says. "But he's got that motor weight down to the absolute minimum, and you can have a serious argument about whether there's enough structural margin built into it. We don't know what the result would be if he ran his system for hours and hours over a wide range."

Cocconi says that, on the contrary, he has driven his car, with the same motor in it, for 28,000 miles, while the latest generation of Impact test cars have gone nowhere near that far. "I've used it as a real car to get experience," he says. "No one else has done that." The battery problem is harder to argue away. Cocconi's drivetrain is powerful, all right but its power punishes the battery pack - so much so that in early drivetrains, the batteries died after 3,500 miles and had to be replaced at the cost of several thousand dollars. Cocconi says his battery maker, Optima, has worked up an experimental battery pack that should last 10,000 miles in his car. Over the next couple of years, he says, battery life span should grow to as much as 30,000 miles, while charging time and drivetrain costs should go down. "We don't need any major breakthrough," he says. "All the technology is here right now."

That's a radical view in the EV world, where hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent in pursuit of a better battery because of the seemingly inherent limitations of lead-acid. Engineers on the Impact often point out that their 'T-pack" of 27 lead-acid batteries puts out the equivalent power of one gallon of gas; hence the campaign to make a superlight and efficient "ground up" to get the most power and range from that minuscule supply. But their figures are based on the premise that unless EVs include the same "goodies" as gas cars, no one will buy them. Power windows and brakes, air conditioning, a good heater system - these are the goodies that drain nearly as much juice from the battery pack as driving. And that, they say, is why Cocconi's car is irrelevant.

"This car," Cocconi allows, "has absolutely no goodies in it. Doesn't have power brakes, doesn't have heating or air conditioning, everything's manual. But it's a very driveable car you can use almost anywhere. If it were to be sold to consumers now, it would offer minimum heating ... I'd probably use propane." For cooling, the car has a fan - period. "Air conditioning, right now, is an administrators gimmick, It raises the operating cost of the vehicle so much, and with the battery life limited right now, it makes no sense. You can look at most of the electric cars owned by utilities or whatever. They have air conditioning, but most of them don't drive. They're in parking lots!"

The utilities and car makers should realize, says Cocconi, that the first thing they, need is a car: A cheap, fast, dependable EV with range in the triple digits. Cocconi's drivetrain, put on a production line to get costs down, could be the answer.

Back in Michigan, the GM engineers putting the finishing touches on their Tucker-like limited edition of 80 third-generation Impacts have paid Cocconi the ultimate compliment, On their progress charts are three lines. One shows the stats of the original Impact. Another shows the lmpact's performance stats now.

A third line shows the stats of Cocconi's AC Propulsion drivetrain.

OVER LUNCH, Cocconi offers two good reasons why he's doing what he does: his parents, both of them nuclear physicists. "But no military stuff, says Cocconi, "just esoteric particle physics." Cocconi recounts all this in the same way he has explained his drivetrain: at great speed, with passion and wit, but also with a certain detachment. Meanwhile, I find myself wondering what he is like when he puts aside EVs for a while and goes biking, as I've heard he does on Sunday afternoons. How would he feel, I ask, about letting me join him?

Cocconi hesitates. "Sure," he says, not very convincingly. 'That would be great."

At noon that Sunday I show up with a vague sense of apprehension. I like to pump out 20 miles at a fairly brisk clip, but I'm certainly no racer. What sort of biker is he? I'm reassured when I see him. I've gone out and bought a pair of black Spandex riding pants for the occasion. Cocconi is still in a flannel shirt and jeans.

We set out on the residential streets of Glendora, he on his Peugeot, I on his girlfriend's PEl Novara. "So," I ask casually, "how far do you like to go?"

"About 3,000 feet." I'm not sure what he means.

"It's that road we drove the other day," he says. "In distance, it's about 10 miles." ten miles up.

The mountain road starts at the edge of town. Within seconds, I'm breathing hard, pedaling with effort in the easiest gear, Curve after curve, we keep pedaling away, the valley below us now, the views expanding as my lungs contract. The distance between us grows, with Cocconi actually behind me, making me think he knows how to pace himself and I don't. I will not give up, I think. And: How can a wonk be such a jock? But it occurs to me, too, that there is a lesson in comparing this ascent to that of the week before. Isn't a car's basic function to get us from point A to point B without having to bike or walk there? And if electric cars, to be affordable and efficient, don't have the power and speed and goodies of gas cars, are we so spoiled we can't adjust to small deprivations to stop befouling our air?

Perhaps 90 minutes later, I reach a ridge and stop; I can go no farther. Cocconi, when he comes pedaling up a minute or two later, makes my day when he tells me this is, in fact, the 3,000-foot point. Below us spreads the Los Angeles basin, with its low-lying blanket of smog. I wonder aloud if the day will come when that smog is gone, with only electric cars below,

Cocconi's answer surprises me. "I think, frankly, that for widespread use we'll need hybrids," he says. "I suspect that the pure electrics will remain pretty much a niche market. With 200 miles tops in range, even with improved batteries, they still won't please everybody. They'll be an upperclass curiosity for commuting only."

Hybrid is the new buzz, beyond electric. Imagine an electric car with a little gas engine attached. When you run low on juice, the gas engine kicks in and generates electricity to recharge the batteries even as it runs the car. The gas engine is far smaller than that in your car today, because it doesn't need to do the hard work of starting the car up from a dead stop, and so its emissions are almost nil.

Skeptics say hybrids, no matter what kind, mean two propulsion systems instead of one, which means, in turn, more complexity and more cost.

Cocconi says he's just a year away from a hybrid of his own design; meanwhile, he's contributed one of his drivetrains to a hybrid-concept car that stole the 1994 L.A. Auto Show in January. The AFS20, a converted Chrysler New Yorker, pairs Cocconi's drivetrain with a "flywheel" battery that spins centrifugally like a potters wheel for long periods of time, generating far more electricity for much longer range than lead-acid batteries. The concept car, produced by American Flywheel Systems in Bellevue, Washington, is still just that a concept, like a model, that doesn't actually run. And Big Three engineers are quick to ask how, even if it can be made to run, can such a car be mass- produced, and at what price?

The answers seem tantalizingly close at hand. Unlike most EV entrepreneurs, Cocconi seems sanguine even at the thought that the mandate could be compromised between now and 1998. Already, he says, he's designing electrics that "meet the performance requirements of gasoline cars.' "I think what we're developing will stand on its own even without the mandate," he concludes, staring down into the city. And with that, he hops onto his Peugeot, and heads back into the gathering smog.