Shake Gently – advertising technology blog

Motorhead from Kansas beats Detroit with alternative fuel cars

Although I wasn’t kind to their subscription process, Fast Company is a great magazine and one of the November articles titled Motorhead Messiah really got my attention.

If you have any interest in cars or going green, I highly recommend checking out the article.

In summary, Johnathan Goodwin, out of Wichita, Kansas, has been experimenting for the last few years and blows away most cars on the market currently in regards to fuel efficiency, performance and emissions.

Johnathan Goodwin can get 100 mpg out of a Lincoln Continental, cut emissions by 80%, and double the horsepower. Does the car business have the guts to follow him?

Goodwin is doing precisely what the big American automakers have always insisted is impossible. They have long argued that fuel-efficient and alternative-fuel cars are a hard sell because they’re too cramped and meek for our market.

As he points out, his conversions consist almost entirely of taking stock GM parts and snapping them together in clever new ways. “They could do all this stuff if they wanted to,” he tells me, 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.”

“Detroit could do all this stuff overnight if it wanted to,” he adds.

He (Goodwin) is a virtuoso of fuel economy. He takes the hugest American cars on the road and rejiggers them to get up to quadruple their normal mileage and burn low-emission renewable fuels grown on U.S. soil–all while doubling their horsepower. The result thrills eco-evangelists and red-meat Americans alike: a vehicle that’s simultaneously green and mean. And word’s getting out.

I applaud Goodwin’s ingenuity, including cracking GM’s anti theft system in MacGyver like fashion to swap out engines. I understand that saving the environment isn’t a simple process, but seeing what others are doing makes me wonder what the big auto makers are up to.

Goodwin also provides a 3 step approach to help ween us off of gasoline.

1) roll out diesel engines, much as Europe has already begun to do (some 50% of all European cars run diesel)

2) diesel-electric hybrid cars

3) produce electric hybrids that run in “dual fuel” mode, burning biodiesel along with hydrogen, ethanol, natural gas, or propane.

There are also some interview videos on YouTube, including an interview with Media Talk out of Tampa Bay:

You can also watch one of his cars, a 1965 Chevy Impala with 800 horsepower that gets 30 MPG, smoke a Lamborghini. This was from a Pimp My Ride episode on MTV:

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