Fire Up Your Batteries

In 1905, a magazine called Horseless Age warned that the fuel supply was limited and ‘farseeing men’ should look for alternatives.

By Earl Swift

That the motoring world might want to rethink its reliance on fossil fuels is hardly a new idea. “One of the great problems of the near future,” warned Thomas J. Fay, perhaps best remembered as the president of the Society of Automotive Engineers, “ . . . will be that of an adequate and suitable fuel supply. The available supply of gasoline, as is well known, is quite limited, and it behooves the farseeing men of the motor car industry to look for likely substitutes.”
Mr. Fay offered that advice, in a magazine called Horseless Age, in 1905—when the embryonic U.S. auto industry consisted of 121 small car makers in 17 states, Cleveland vied with Detroit as Motor City, and Henry Ford ’s Model T was still three years off. At that time, despite viable alternatives—steam, electricity and trial engines that burned everything from denatured alcohol to corn liquor—86.2% of the nation’s new cars were powered by gasoline. More than a century later, Fay (or his great-grandchildren) could voice the same worry without changing a word. Only now his audience would be all ears: Fretful about dwindling oil reserves and the gas engine’s collateral damage, auto makers and their customers are clamoring for the very sort of clean, efficient powertrains that their great-grandfathers abandoned.
To explain the scramble for the next-generation auto—and the roles played in that race by governments, auto makers, venture capitalists, environmentalists and private inventors—comes Levi Tillemann’s “The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future.” “Today’s race is fundamentally different from what came before,” Mr. Tillemann writes in the book’s introduction, “in that it marks a decisive shift away from Henry Ford’s oil-fueled internal combustion engine to something else. The overwhelming odds are that the car of the future will drive on electricity in some form or another, and eventually it will be less car than robot. In other words, it will drive itself.”
The air of skunk works discovery, of tinkering genius, hangs thick over these opening pages, and Mr. Tillemann seems ideally cast to guide us through the big ideas percolating in the world’s far-flung workshops and labs. He is an inventor himself: With his father and brothers, he conceived a gasoline engine, the IRIS, that is smaller and theoretically more efficient than standard designs of the same output, and over the past decade the design has won attaboys from NASA and ConocoPhillips. He has pitched the engine in Detroit’s corporate suites. He speaks Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and Japanese.
His book seems right on time, too, for at no point has the industry been in such flux, with its leaders willing to reconsider the assumptions that have steered it for generations. How we got to this point is itself a monumental subject, filled with heroes and heartbreak, damn-the-world courage and expensive miscues. Mr. Tillemann divides the tale into three parts, the first charting how California’s ratcheting environmental regulations sparked a world-wide drive for emissions controls and better gas mileage in the 1990s. We look on as Honda engineers refine the company’s engines until some “were running so clean that the air coming out of the tailpipe was cleaner than the ambient levels in the lab and natural environment.” We meet Takeshi Uchiyamada, who led Toyota’s development of the Prius and launched a global craze for hybrids. We witness GM’s flirtation with electric cars—signaled when then-CEO Roger Smith tooled around in a two-seater in 1990.
Mr. Tillemann’s second section details Japanese car makers’ scramble to develop electrics in the late 1990s and early oughts; America’s efforts to keep up (or, in the case of Tesla’s Elon Musk , show the way); and China’s all-thumbs bid to leapfrog the competition with an electric fleet of its own. The last section, a bit softer in its focus, relates how the Great Recession and other recent disasters weeded out the dilettantes.
All of this should make for lively reading. Alas, it does not, in part because Mr. Tillemann’s writing bleeds the drama from his story: Characters worth our attention go unfleshed; action reads as if it has been observed from a great height. Mr. Tillemann evidently traveled the world and conducted a great many interviews for his story, but the fruits of his personal observation are largely invisible; the reader never has the sense of being in the middle of, and witness to, the events he describes.
Instead, the whole business feels a lot like a textbook—an impression bolstered early on by a subchapter headed “Organization of Contents” and cemented by Mr. Tillemann’s phrasing, which veers here and there into academese and is studded throughout with mechanical tics. Stronger editing might have eliminated such inelegance, but it would take a complete overhaul to provide this narrative the speed and thrills that its subject deserves.
Almost as vexing, “The Great Race” fails to deliver on the promises of its subtitle, let alone of the introduction, because it is less about the car of the future than about the car of the past few years—a history of how today’s electric cars and gas-sipping hybrids came to be. Only in a 19-page afterword does Mr. Tillemann turn his attention to the days and cars to come, and here he relies on vague prognostication rather than sharp analysis or storytelling. His passages on autonomous cars—which he says are a sure thing—are reminiscent of 1950s magazine pieces about the nuclear sedans we would soon be driving.
Readers of “The Great Race” may be smarter for having taken the ride, but most won’t have much fun along the way. Even Mr. Fay, unabashed in his curiosity about the horseless carriage, would probably find that it feels too much like work.

Mr. Swift is the author, most recently, of “Auto Biography: A Classic Car, An Outlaw Motorhead, and 57 Years of the American Dream.”