His pet PHEV

Andrew Frank, proud father of the "car of the future," has a news flash for gas guzzlers: The future is now.

For more than three decades, the engineering professor at the University of California, Davis, has been touting vehicles that power up by plugging into household electrical outlets. For many of those years, he had a hard time getting the right people to take him seriously.

But now, at the age of 74, Frank is getting plenty of attention.

"The stars are aligned," he says, showing off a plug-in Chevrolet Equinox in a garage just a few steps from his office on campus.

"Companies could build these cars tomorrow at a reasonable cost," he says, "and I am going to make sure it happens in my lifetime."

Thanks to a "perfect storm" of superior technology, soaring gas prices and concern about the environment, Frank has the attention of the nation's big automakers and the ears of industry leaders, including former Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca. Public interest in his "plug-in hybrid electric vehicle," or PHEV, he says, has never been higher.

On Tuesday, Frank and his fuel-sipping PHEV will be featured in a NOVA public- television program starring the motorhead humorists Tom and Ray Magliozzi. Titled "Car of the Future," the show is a lighthearted look at what it might take to make autos more energy-efficient.

The Magliozzi brothers visited Frank's shop with a television crew last year.

"We had so much fun!" the professor says. But his mission is no laughing matter.

Frank believes his technology has the potential to curb global warming and free the nation and the world of dependence on fossil fuels.

"If the car companies would build these things, we could transform ourselves from oil to electricity immediately," he says.

As gas prices have skyrocketed during the past decade, so has interest in hybrid cars like the popular Toyota Prius. Frank's version of the hybrid can be recharged using a standard household outlet, and on trips of up to 60 miles, his PHEV burns not a drop of gasoline. Overall, it gets about 100 miles per gallon of fuel.

"I see guys spending $100 to fill up their SUVs, and I think, 'We've got to get PHEVs in production!'" Frank says.

It could happen soon.

General Motors, which produced the doomed EV1 electric car in the 1990s, plans to release its plug-in Volt in 2010, the company has said. Executives from Toyota and Ford also have said they are interested in the vehicles.

Iacocca has called the PHEV "the wave of the future" in transportation, and praises Frank as an innovator.

"He thinks very highly of professor Frank and the work he has done," says Iacocca's assistant, Norma Saken, adding that the two men have met several times to discuss the technology.

The Magliozzi brothers, mechanics and engineers who regularly rail about the evils of the internal combustion engine in newspaper columns and on their National Public Radio show, "Car Talk," also are big fans of Frank and his vehicles.

They predict plug-ins will be common sights in three to five years.

"The only disadvantage is that America is going to need a buttload of extension cords!" Ray Magliozzi quips in an e-mail to The Bee.

Dating back to his days as a teenage "hot-rodder" in Pasadena, Frank has forever been tinkering with cars. One of his first projects was equipping his 1936 Ford with a powerful Cadillac engine.

"The whole idea was to look cool, but I'm not sure I accomplished that," he says with a chuckle.

His interest in mechanics led him to the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California, where he earned engineering degrees and started thinking about electric cars. He built his first hybrid in 1972, "but the technology wasn't good enough," he says. "We had no computers or high-powered electronics that could be used for this purpose."

So Frank began developing those elements, one piece at a time. Over the years, with the help of his UC Davis students and donated parts from automobile companies, he has converted a dozen vehicles to PHEVs, yanking big engines and replacing them with electric motors that work in tandem with smaller gasoline engines.

About the writer:

• Call the Bee's Cynthia Hubert, (916) 321-1082.