Toward a Peanut Butter Car

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

It is just possible that historians may look back some day and decide that the best idea to come out of Jimmy Carter's first term was--of all things -- Transportation Secretary Brock Adams' challenge: "Reinvent the car."

The survival of the U.S. as we know it rests on our ability to use less fuel and yet preserve the nation's circulatory system. The auto industry, running at about $100 billion a year, after some grousing has joined the reinvention deliberations. The Government is preparing to take part in a $100 million research program. Reinventing the car has become part of the political and economic language since Adams first proposed it last Dec. 5.

The idea has been in the back shop for years. What Adams did was bring it up in the right place at the right time. It is now policy.

"What bugged me," says Adams, "was the misuse of the automobile in this city." Day after day, he went to work bumper to bumper, crawling at 5 m.p.h. to 15 m.p.h. around the Kennedy Center, burning gas, inhaling everybody else's fumes. He was caught in a monstrous mechanical snake, frustrated and angry. The insurance costs on his own 1971 Ford station wagon and 1973 Maverick jumped. A battery went dead one rainy morning, and he had to drive unshaven to Sears for a replacement. There was a line, so he had to take a number, like somebody at a meat market. The waiting seemed to take forever. Waste, waste. Why, why?

About then the Secretary got an invitation to talk to the Detroit Economic Club. In the past, aspiring Davids have found that their stones merely bounced off the skulls of those Goliaths who make cars. In that den, lions get eaten by the club members.

Why not give it to them straight? thought Adams. He had just arrived at a critical conclusion. The transportation policy of the previous decade had been based on the flawed idea of persuading Americans to get out of their cars and use other forms of transportation. The data before him showed it could not be done short of a threat of extinction. Also, his probings of the auto industry convinced him that there was more research in sales and promotion than in the mechanics of making cars. "Go back to 'cut and try' engineering," he told his astonished audience six months ago. "Revive Henry Ford the First's tactic of pitting one engineering team against another."

Henry Ford's grandson was contemptuous. "Like trying to cure cancer in five years," he grumped. "Brock wants to repeal the laws of thermodynamics," said a man at General Motors. "A peanut butter car," hooted the Wall Street Journal recalling a dream from earlier decades that some day anything--even peanut butter--could be used as fuel. One auto engineer said they already had "a bellows car" powered by Secretaries of Transportation turning a handle that shot hot air out the back.

Brock persisted. He assembled skeptical experts in February, hung on his wall the Detroit News cartoon showing him as a heavenly messenger hovering with tire and spark plug and saying, "Don't just stand there! Invent something!" And the realities of oil began to change minds. Hundreds of engineers and scientists gathered and debated the prospects. They made out a report that went to the White House, concluding that major breakthroughs in engines, fuels and structures were possible.

Here and there one can hear the experts mutter that maybe by 1990 we can have mass production of clean, comfortable, safe cars that average 50 or even 75 miles to the gallon. History is working for Adams' challenge. Enough people around Detroit remember Henry the First's caustic reminiscence in the 1920s. Said Ford: "All the wise people demonstrated conclusively that the new gas engine could not compete with steam."

Detroit has enough trouble without being caught scoffing at an idea that could change the nature of the city's underlying industry.

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