Bill Pierre Ford

He’s president of the Toronto-based company that builds the all-electric ZENN Car (Zero Emissions No Noise) but he’s not focusing on making many more of the little low-speed runabouts.

Says Ian Clifford: “This is nothing to do with building cars, it’s all about energy storage.”

There are about 500 ZENNs on the road in the 40 U.S. states where-low speed cars are legal. It’s a little French-built micro-car that ZENN outfits with an electric motor and enough lead acid batteries to run it about 60 kilometres (in warm weather) on an eight-hour charge.

That’s useful enough for buzzing around in local neighbourhoods but it’s not the disruptive technology Clifford is seeking.

He has now bet the farm on a unique energy storage device from a company in Texas. The company is EEStor and the device is an ultra capacitor that, on a five-minute charge, can supposedly hold 52 kilowatt-hours in a 136-kg unit. That would be enough power to drive an electric car about 400 kilometres. It would also be enough to send most gasoline engines to the scrap heap.

The only problem: No one has ever seen this thing.

Vaughan: Ian, you’ve come a long way from when I first met you and you were stuffing an electric motor and a ton of batteries in an old Renault Dauphine, which I think you called the Feel Good Car.

Clifford: Oh, I’ve learned a lot.

With ZENN, we’ve sold 500 electric cars, which makes us one of the largest electric car companies in the world if you put it in that context.

But it’s a drop in the bucket — there are 250 million cars in the United States.

We have revenue, we make profit on the cars we sell, but we are totally in investment mode. It’s all focused heavily on EEStor’s technology.

You need a better battery.

Electric cars in huge numbers are do-able with the right battery technology.

This is nothing to do with building cars; it’s all about energy storage.

Isn’t the answer with the battery companies doing lithium-ion or lithium-polymer?

They don’t have a clue four years out what’s going to happen to their batteries. They really don’t.

You know what’s going to happen in a cellphone, but 50 kilowatt-hours of energy storage in a car — forget it, they don’t have a clue.

Even with some of the established lithium battery companies — they don’t know how to price their technology because of all the uncertainty in the technology.

They’re setting up massive government-backed trust funds to settle warranty claims on the batteries because they don’t know how they’ll behave.

So you’re going a different way.

Back in 2002, we started looking at battery technologies seriously and that’s when we met EEStor, which was developing ultra-capacitor technology.

People had taken runs at ultra capacitors, but typically the problem they hadn’t been able to get over was the voltage limitations. EEStor has developed new materials that get over it.

The only capacitor that I can think of is in a flash camera.

A flash camera has a battery that dumps power into a capacitor.

Capacitors in their current form are really great at taking power very quickly and discharging it very quickly. They’re not good at storing it; they lose the power very, very quickly.

Capacitors have been around for a long time and they’re a buffer technology — in the case of flash photography, they’re in between the flash tube and the plug in the wall.

They’re able to hold a whole bunch of power and displace it really, really quickly and recharge really, really quickly.

They have not typically been able to store large amounts of energy for a long period of time and that’s what EEStor is doing.

Can you show me one of these or show an investor one of these even if it doesn’t power a car but maybe an electric can opener?

No. Because of the way our agreement is structured with EEStor, it’s all milestone-based and the next milestone is a chemical milestone with third-party verification of the science.

The following milestone is delivery of a production prototype unit for a car and that’s late next year.

Who is EEStor anyway? I couldn’t find much about them.

The guys who have developed this technology come from hard-disk manufacturing.

If you think of a hard drive 10 years ago — think about a one-gigabyte hard drive 10 years ago — it was [huge] and it spun up like a jet. In my BlackBerry now, I’ve got 16 gigabytes of information storage.

They’re basically taking the best of battery technology and the best of capacitor technology to mash it into a solid-state energy storage device that doesn’t have any of the limitations of a chemical battery.

You found them in 2002 and you still can’t show me an example of what they do. Are they years late?

They’re not years late.

Everyone keeps saying that. But they developed the technology about 12 years ago — that’s when they did the patent work and the lab work. But they didn’t have a facility until 2006.

Now, in Austin, Texas, they have a state-of-the-art production facility that’s ready to deliver production units in 2009.

They’ve gone from a standing start to production in a three-year period. It’s pretty extraordinary.

They sure keep a low profile.

Lockheed Martin is involved, Kleiner Perkins (venture capital behind Google) is involved. They’ve got heavy hitters in this thing and they’re total stealth.

It’s not a scam because they’re not raising money and they’re not talking to anybody.

We have a unique relationship with them because I got it at the angel-investor level. If I’d met them after Kleiner, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Your deal is what?

ZENN invested $2.5-million (U.S.) in 2007 for an equity position of 3.8 per cent of EEStor plus options.

And we have a $2.5-million technology agreement that we inked back in 2004 and we’re halfway through the milestones on that.

It gives us an exclusive licence to use their technology in compact and subcompact cars.

But we don’t want to be in the car-building business. We’ve used the Intel model — our idea is that our drive system becomes kind of ubiquitous. The Intel inside of the car.

You’re more excited than even in the Feel Good days.

This kind of energy storage changes how we consider energy, period.

It displaces fossil fuel entirely. It’s not just about cars; it’s about energy. It’s for new cars and it’s for existing cars.

There are 800 million cars that are already on the planet — we can retrofit them, too.

Cleveland Engine Plant No. 1 becomes the first Ford manufacturing site to produce advanced fuel-efficient EcoBoost engines

– Ford invests $55 million to retool and reopen Cleveland Engine No. 1; 250 jobs have been added to the plant to produce the new engines

– EcoBoost uses gasoline turbocharged direct-injection technology for up to 20 percent better fuel economy, 15 percent fewer CO2 emissions and superior driving performance versus larger displacement engines

– EcoBoost will first be available this summer on the 2010 Lincoln MKS, Lincoln MKT, Ford Taurus SHO and Ford Flex, expanding availability to 90 percent of Ford’s nameplates by 201

CLEVELAND, May 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Ford Motor Company (NYSE: F) today marked the start of production of its advanced fuel-efficient EcoBoost engines at Cleveland Engine Plant No. 1 – a key step in Ford’s plan to deliver leading fuel economy across millions of vehicles.

Ford invested $55 million to retool and reopen the plant, which had been idled in 2007. Approximately 250 employees are returning to the plant to build the new engines.

EcoBoost technology combines turbocharging and direct gasoline injection to deliver up to 20 percent improved fuel economy, 15 percent fewer CO2 emissions and superior driving performance compared with larger displacement engines. The “downsize and boost” strategy provides consumers better fuel economy without sacrificing the power they want for driving performance.

“This launch of the first EcoBoost engine is a significant milestone in Ford’s overall commitment to deliver affordable fuel efficiency for millions,” said Barb Samardzich, vice president, Global Powertrain Engineering. “We’ve spent the past two years developing EcoBoost technology and now our customers will finally have the opportunity to experience what this engine delivers, the power of a V-8 with the fuel economy of a V-6.”

About EcoBoost

The 3.5-liter EcoBoost V-6 engine, the first V-6 direct-injection twin-turbocharged engine produced in North America, will make its debut in the 2010 Lincoln MKS, Lincoln MKT, Ford Taurus SHO and Ford Flex this summer. A V-6 EcoBoost engine will be available for the F-150 in 2010.

Ford will deliver EcoBoost across the full range of its product portfolio, from small cars to large trucks and by 2013, will offer EcoBoost engines, V-6s and I-4s, on 90 percent of its North American nameplates. Within three years, Ford expects to deliver 750,000 EcoBoost-equipped vehicles per year in North America and 1.3 million vehicles globally.

The 3.5-liter EcoBoost V-6 engine delivers 355 horsepower and a responsive 350 ft.-lb. of torque across a broad RPM range.

New Life for Historic Plant

Cleveland Engine Plant No. 1 opened in 1951 as Ford’s first engine plant in Ohio. Since then it has produced more than 35 million engines, including 24.3 million engines in the famous 302 and 5.0-liter V-8 family. In 2004, Ford invested $350 million into the plant for redesign and installation of an all-new assembly line as well as block, crankshaft and cylinder head machining lines.

Cleveland Engine Plant No. 1 has been outfitted with a flexible powertrain manufacturing system that can be easily reprogrammed to perform new tasks with minimal disruption to production.

“The ability to reprogram on the fly is a key feature of this new manufacturing system,” said Charles Binger, Cleveland site manager. “We don’t have to shut down an entire plant in order to make major changes to the line, helping to speed up modifications and keep downtime to a minimum.”

Plant upgrades also included a special turbocharger installation and test line. After the turbos are added, each EcoBoost engine is turned on speeds between 60-600 RPM using an electric motor to simulate running conditions. Unique to the Cleveland site, this “cold test” checks for proper buildup of pressure on the turbo output side before the engine ever leaves the factory.

To ensure quality is built into the engine from the outset, Ford developed a new, internal database for its operations. Each engine will be built with a sophisticated, embedded engine “birth history” that allows plant engineers to track every stage of production.

The engine history, maintained in a microchip database, includes hundreds of metrics and allows engineers to trace the precise path taken by any part so any quality control issue can be traced back to its source.

Extensive Employee Training

To prepare for production of the EcoBoost engine, Cleveland Engine Plant No. 1 work force participated in intensive quality training. Along with learning basic manufacturing operations, employees also learned to manage their own equipment and work area through “manufacturing work teams” at the facility.

“Training workers to do their jobs is one thing,” said Kevin Heck, Cleveland Engine No. 1 manufacturing manager. “But we’ve gone beyond that by giving team members significant responsibility for their output. It’s up to the hourly team members to produce a high-quality engine, and we’ve empowered them to make that happen.”

“We’re proud of the efforts we’ve made to improve quality,” said Mike Gammella, president, UAW Local 1250. “We have an outstanding work force at the Cleveland site, working together to ensure we’re not just competitive, but the best in the industry.”

Production Innovations through Supplier Collaboration

The twin-turbocharged 3.5-liter EcoBoost V-6 engine’s enhanced fuel-charging system can deliver as much as 2,150 PSI of fuel pressure – more than 35 times the pressure seen in a conventional port-fuel-injected V-6. Ford worked in tandem with Bosch, the fuel system supplier, to ensure that manufacturing and assembly was prepared for the demands of the advanced design.

“The EcoBoost line has a fully automated fuel-charging assembly and rundown station,” said Joseph Basmaji, Ford direct injection fuel system technical specialist. “It’s a new technology in manufacturing that’s only been made possible by close collaboration between Ford and our suppliers.”