For enthusiastic supporters of the new hybrid gasoline-electric cars like the Toyota Prius, this month's report by auto industry consultant J.D. Power and Associates may have seemed like a bucket of cold water.

The Thinkers
This monthly series will highlight people from Western Pennsylvania who are on the forefront of new ideas in their fields.

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Tony Tye, Post-Gazette Click photo for larger image. Name: Isaac R. Porche III Age: 36 Position: Policy expert, Rand Corp. Education: Doctorate, electrical engineering and computer science, University of Michigan, 1998. Master's, electrical engineering, University of California at Berkeley, 1992. Bachelor's, electrical engineering, Southern University, 1989. Previous work: Since 1998, Rand projects on Army's future communications needs; electric ship design for U.S. Navy; analysis of California's zero-emission vehicle program; and other issues. Project engineer for General Motors Corp., 1992-1994, working on EV1 electric vehicle development. Research engineer, Environmental Institute of Michigan, 1995-1997, working on traffic detection technology and transportation infrastructure studies. Publications: "Future Army Bandwidth Needs and Capabilities," March 2004. "Driven into a Corner: To Clean the Air, California Can Steer Old Cars and New Cars in Better Directions", RAND Review, Fall 2002. The Series Click here to view other installments in this continuing series.

The hybrids, J.D. Power predicted, will never gain more than 3 percent of the total U.S. market, or about 535,000 vehicles, largely because they cost several thousand dollars more apiece than standard cars and trucks.

Isaac Porche III believes the consultant is wrong -- but not for the reasons one might think.

Porche is a 36-year-old policy expert at the Rand Corp. think tank in Oakland. He spends most of his time these days analyzing the future communications needs of America's armed forces, but his hobby, and much of his training, is in energy-saving automobiles.

Unlike environmentalists or those who want to free the United States from dependence on foreign oil, Porche is not basing his bullish prediction for hybrids on the fact that they can get up to 60 miles per gallon and reduce pollution.

American buyers already have shown that high mileage and cleaner emissions aren't enough to drive most of them to a new model.

What attracts most U.S. car buyers, he said, is power, safety and "image" -- all features that they're willing to pay extra for, and all features that many of the new hybrids will be able to offer.

To see where the hybrid market might be heading, Porche said, pay attention to advance orders for the new Lexus hybrid SUV, the RX400h. Already, buyers have placed sight-unseen orders for half the 24,000 models that will be offered for sale in the United States this year -- at an estimated $45,000 sticker price.

Porche cited two salient facts about the RX400h: the four-wheel-drive SUV will get 30 mpg, and it will be able to accelerate to 60 mph in eight seconds.

It's the second fact that will drive more sales than the first, he predicted, and that offers a hint of why bigger hybrid vehicles may take a sizeable share of the future automotive market.

The new Lexus, like Toyota and Ford hybrids, uses the electric motor for starting and early acceleration, with the gasoline engine kicking in later, while a competing hybrid model made by Honda uses an efficient gasoline engine for starting and supplements it at higher speeds with the electric motor.

Voltage for vroom

Electric motors have always been more efficient than gasoline engines because they don't waste energy by inefficiently burning fuel or transmitting their power through gears, Porche said.

"So when your neighbor gets that new Lexus that smokes you off the light because you're in your Dodge Durango that needs to sip gas for about 10 seconds before it really wants to move, he's going to go, 'I want that hybrid Lexus and I'll pay an extra $10,000 for it.' "

When Porche refers to American drivers' lust for power, though, he isn't just talking about the speed of an automobile -- he's also talking about the increasing demand for electrical power for accessories and controls inside the vehicle.

And that is reason No. 2 why he believes hybrid technology may have a much bigger future than J.D. Power forecasts.

"I call it the 'Pimp My Ride' phenomenon," said Porche, referring to the MTV program that transforms everyday cars into customized high-performance vehicles that are often loaded with electrical gizmos like motorized shoe racks or remote-controlled digital cameras.

"People want everything in their cars -- all kinds of electronics, all kinds of gadgets.

"But guess what -- a 12-volt battery in a standard car will not take care of the power needs that people are going to have. If you start cranking up power on a car the way it is now, the wires will catch on fire and burn the car down."

Hybrids will help deal with that reality by making it cheaper to produce electric motors, nickel hydride batteries and other new components. Eventually, vehicles may feature auxiliary power supplies and separate wiring to accommodate all the devices people want to use.

The other reason hybrids may succeed, at least for the next few decades, is that they continue to make some use of the internal combustion engine.

That doesn't please those who want to sharply cut America's dependency on oil, but Porche noted that it's very hard to change an industry that has been built around one type of engine for nearly 100 years.

Moving to a more environmentally friendly auto industry isn't just a matter of developing new engines that run on new fuels, he said -- it's also how to do that in a way that won't cause a whole segment of the economy to collapse.

The auto industry includes not only the big plants that assemble vehicles, but "engine manufacturers, engine components makers, radio manufacturers, pump makers, all these systems. You're talking about changing a business model that's been very profitable" and is heavily entrenched.

Hydrogen-powered future?

Eventually, Porche believes there will be a new standard automobile, and it's likely to be powered by an electric engine that runs on hydrogen and has almost no toxic emissions -- the technology that President Bush has promoted in his State of the Union messages.

Porche would be happy to see a hydrogen-powered car come along and help clean up the skies -- but he didn't always feel that way.

Ironically, even though he once worked on General Motors' experimental electric vehicle program, Porche didn't have much sympathy for environmentalists.

"We used to say 'Who are these green people, these fanatics? Save a whale, leave us alone.' "

It was only after Porche got his doctorate in traffic control engineering at the University of Michigan in 1998 that he developed a "greener" outlook.

It happened when he was hired by Rand and moved with his family to work in its Santa Monica, Calif., headquarters, near Los Angeles.

"It didn't occur to me until I was driving into that brown layer of air out there that this could have health impacts. My kid developed asthma, and I developed a hacking cough that I still have to this day.

"The first time I realized that tailpipe emissions were making me sick, it all of a sudden became a political issue."

GM had recruited Porche when he was a 19-year-old undergraduate electrical engineering student at Southern University in his hometown of Baton Rouge, La.

The automaker paid for the conclusion of his undergraduate education and for his master's degree in electrical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, where he helped develop an automated highway system, a demonstration project that proved that 15 cars could move safely along an experimental roadway without any drivers controlling them.

He went to work for GM after that, helping design the electronic ignition and security system for the EV1 battery-powered car.

GM produced about 700 of the high-performance electric vehicles starting in 1996, leasing them primarily to drivers in California, which had developed strict new air pollution standards.

But for reasons that are still murky, GM eventually decided to kill off the EV1 program, pulling the cars off the market and crushing them as their leases expired. The decision has provoked outrage among EV1 enthusiasts, and as recently as this month, a group of them led by actor Ed Begley Jr. were staging public protests in an attempt to change the company's mind.

It was during his two years at GM that Porche also had to undergo the most unrelenting stretch of jokes about his name.

In Louisiana, Porche is a common Creole name, but once he left the state and went to work for GM, he had to listen to almost daily gags, even though his surname is spelled differently than that of the German luxury automaker.

But at least he didn't go through what his sister did, Porche said. When she attended Dartmouth College, somebody in the admissions office made sure her roommate was a young woman named Ferrari.

A car to power your house

Porche believes the best hope for a commercial low-emission vehicle in the future is hydrogen technology, in which low-cost fuel cells would split hydrogen into its constituent protons and electrons to generate electricity that would power an electric motor.

Some of the major U.S. developers of fuel cells are based in this region, including Siemens Westinghouse in Churchill and the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Morgantown, W.Va.

The hydrogen fuel might be supplied by the equivalent of gas stations scattered around the country, which could convert natural gas into hydrogen that could be pumped into vehicle tanks, Porche said.

While many people instinctively fear the explosiveness of hydrogen fuel, haunted by old newsreels of the Hindenburg zeppelin disaster, Porche believes the fuel would be as safe as gasoline.

The bigger challenge would be creating a network of hydrogen fueling stations.

An intriguing alternative, he said, would be to connect devices known as reformers to natural gas lines at people's homes. The reformers would convert the natural gas into hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

That would let someone fuel up his car at home, and could even allow the car to generate electricity for the house.

In that scenario, you would drive to your home at night, hook the car up to the reformer, and use the car's fuel cells to route electricity into your house, reducing your need for power from the local utility company.

If such a system were in place, Porche said, "not only would we have lower emissions but we'd have a safer power distribution system. If a hurricane hits and you lose power, no big deal. You turn the car on."

All of this may seem far-fetched today, and Porche is quick to acknowledge that such changes are probably 50 years away at least.

Nevertheless, he said, "it's important to take the first steps now, because you know in the very long run you don't want to be dependent on oil and gasoline."