Ann Arbor

A converted warehouse.

It sits in the middle of nowhere, amid a patchwork of fallow open lands and construction sites.

The site, located about ten miles outside the Ann Arbor campus, is patrolled by stray cats, and strewn with wild shrubs, rubble and car carcasses.

But don’t let the looks fool you.

The site is home to a veritable temple of technology: this is where the University of Michigan’s solar cars are designed, built, tested, and shipped.

As I stepped out of the cab, the sound of nail guns mixed with the drone of jigsaws to break the bucolic silence.

Inside the garage, amid gaping engine compartments and hulking pieces of automotive hardware, a couple of students/engineers sat on the pavement floor tightening screws, working up a sweat trying to solve what appeared to be thorny technical problems.

The floor was cluttered with debris: yellow and blue duct tape, an empty soda cup from Taco Bell, a tattered diagram of what seemed to be a brake balance assembly, half-empty Sam’s choice water bottles, a torn yellow duffel bag, and glasses missing a lens.

The workshop was crammed with floor-to-ceiling racks of tools, toolboxes, equipment and heaping stacks of open cartons; the walls were covered with blowups of their work and posters of past solar cars and their developers.

Makeshift tables were overflowing with schematic drawings, technical reports, pictures, financial information, budget sheets, planning materials, and more.

It was your typical car garage without the pungent smell of oil.

Americans drive more than 5 billion miles a day, which accounts for about 40 percent of US oil consumption and 20 percent of the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions.

Michigan solar car effort is partially sponsored by Ford and GM. The giant automakers invested time and money because they see the project as a proving ground for solar technologies that might one day contribute to the effort to help the environment.

Sabina and I visited this warehouse to meet with some University of Michigan students, part of the team that helped design, develop, finance, and race the university’s new solar car, Infinium.

Infinium is scheduled to race in two upcoming competitions.

The first is the 2009 World Solar Challenge, a grueling 1,800-mile race across the Australian outback, considered to be the premiere solar car race in the world.

The second competition is the 2010 North American Solar Challenge, a college-only race that covers 2,500 miles of urban and rural highway through America and the Canada.

Infinium is the latest model for a Michigan program that has won five of the nine North American challenges since 1990.

The solar car is a BIG deal here at University of Michigan: the team is made up of more than 100 students, and faculty and alumni help as much as possible.

Immediately upon entering the garage, my eyes locked on the carbon-fiber custom-built car: Infinium.

One word to describe it?

Sexy.

It is an ultra-light, 16-hp, three-phase, in-wheel electric motor kit, a closed-cockpit marvel of precision engineering, power, and speed (in the 90-mile range).

Its most striking feature is an aerodynamic, wind-dodging shape, made to optimize the impact of airflow, wind resistance and aerodynamic drag, but also allowing aerodynamic efficiency to guide aesthetics.

Solar cars are made from more than 200 components, almost all of them custom-made. Students on the team design the car’s wheels, brakes, battery pack and hubs. Every aspect is aerodynamically designed, from the body to the narrow-windowed fairings.

Beneath the sun/energy-absorbing shell lies a web of nifty electrical engineering. That’s all I’m going to say about that, partly because I’m not sure I know what I’m talking about here, but mainly because it is confidential/classified info ( this is, after all, a multimillion-dollar competition).

In fact, we learned that some of the engineers’ biggest challenges was to come up with inexpensive methods for producing a lightweight, high-strength body that could withstand the rigors of the Australian outback and still be molded into the crazy shape they envisioned.

It’s this last point - that a winning vehicle has to be safe and ready to be manufactured at a reasonable cost - that separates the fantasy cars from those that actually take part in the competition.

The team has been trying a number of options, from streamlined versions of existing technologies to completely novel contraptions.

Ford and other behemoth automakers are sure to be watching carefully for interesting technologies. If the team designs, say, a clever hybrid engine that could improve the electric range of a Chevy Volt, it could sell the design to GM and emerge a big winner regardless of whether it does well in the race.

Steve Hechtman, for his part, is playing to win. Steve, who graduated in the Spring of 2009 with a major in electrical engineering, has been an integral part of the University of Michigan’s solar car “dream team” for four years, helping them capture last year’s North American Solar Challenge championships. This year, as the project manager, he oversees the round-the-clock operations: designing, engineering, building, checking, testing, developing, and running the solar car.

Of course, savvy engineering isn’t the only way to get an edge in this fiercely competitive world.

The program is made of four divisions: Business, Operations, Engineering, Strategy. They all work hand in hand.

It also helps to know what the weather will be like, for example. Consequently, the team routinely gets the help of student meteorologists to get an edge.

Steve was accompanied by Chris, an engineer and a sophomore at U of M. His corn-fed, all-American good looks can be misleading. He is in fact one of the many intensely competitive, die-hard students who shape their college careers almost exclusively around the solar car, so dedicated to the project that he didn’t think twice about taking last spring semester off in order to fully help the team build the 2009 car.

The students gave us a tour of the workspace. They showed us the ‘office’ where engineers and designers would spend days hunched over drawing boards, sketching a faster, smoother solar car - one that could help the university capture its first ever World Championship (the team has finished as high as 3^rd three times) or at least nibble into the Dutch unassailable dominance (they have never been defeated in the World Championship!).

And sometimes most of the day is spent discussing the nuts and bolts of creating a winning solar car.

Like Steve, Chris is convinced that the three-wheeled car they’ve built has a legitimate shot.

As we finish our tour, more students pour through the doors, mobile phones pressed to their ears, empty backpacks flapping on their shoulders.

They looked smart, organized, and restless.

The students, most of them engineers, dropped their backpacks and immediately get to work, producing renderings and computer models of the solar car, discussing validation of the math-based analysis and physical testing, tweaking in their laptops last-minute diagnostic software for an upcoming test run.

These like-minded wide-eyed dreamers create technology the old-fashioned way: by locking up the doors behind them and sweating and bleeding until the job is done right. It’s a routine that never ends.

But again, they don’t want it to end.

And it’s hard not to get caught up in the team’s enthusiasm.

The place is pulsing with opportunity, full of inspired creators and devoted workers. The mood is egalitarian; there are no special treatments for team leaders or older team members. They are free to choose which aspect of the project they work on and whom to partner up with on it.

In this democracy, all are young and equal college students.

They symbolize what tomorrow could be like: shiny and happy, a clean, lucrative and electric force that could reverse the auto industry’s decline.

In Michigan, the future has never looked so green… Or should I say blue?

Where better to show off a new breed of car than at NASCAR? On Sunday, I accompanied members of the U of M Solar Car team to a NASCAR event. It was my first time attending a NASCAR race, and it was truly a cultural experience. It was a hot day, with people out on their RVs drinking beer, flying flags, blaring music and having a fun-filled summer day at the race track. The team was invited to drive the car in the pre-race parade. It was one of the first times this year’s car was driven for more than a test drive. And, I must say, it was truly a site to be seen! The car glides effortlessly over the road, with only a soft whir to betray the high-tech engine encompassed in a shapely, aerodynamic carbon fiber shell. The car reached speeds of about 35 mph during the parade. It was only one lap around the track, but that was enough–it’s one thing to hear about a solar car, see pictures, even see it being worked on in the garage. But to watch it being driven is a different thing entirely.

One of the most striking things about the solar car is that it really is a labor of love. Students commit their lives to the team. But watching that car go down the track, I can certainly see why it’s worth it.

I’m not going to talk about it.

Runaway health costs, cascading layoffs and the subsequent loss of blue-collar jobs, the twin bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler, the vast overhaul of free-market principles, the rising number of vacant buildings along the Interstate 75 automotive corridor, the sagging retail real-estate market, the dearth of retirement savings…

I’m not going to talk about it.
Enough’s been said about Detroit’s sorry state.

Besides, the fate of the city, and insofar the entire state of Michigan isn’t in the financial crisis, foreign competition, corporate greed, union intransigence, energy costs, or even management insularity and incompetence. Nope.

The fate of both, the city and the state, is in Ann Arbor.

Across the nation, the economic crisis has systematically stifled entrepreneurial activity in many industries so much that projects that experiment with new ideas are now being shelved and funding for new ventures is being scaled back. As business management analyst Bhaskar Chakravorti put it last month, institutions’ natural tendency has been to hunker down, follow the status quo, and just try to survive in the hopes that, one day, things simply get better.

In fact, priorities in most organizations are largely to save money; refocus, freeze, cut or cancel budgets and capital commitments; lower operating expenses, etc.

But that doesn’t seem to be the way they do things at the University of Michigan.

Here on the Ann Arbor campus, it seems that the (financial) crisis has been nothing less than a catalyst for around-the-clock creativity and has done little to dent the ambitions of those contrarians, tech gurus and venture capitalists alike, who press ahead with ideas and innovations that could help better life in their community.

Italian philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli once said, “Never waste the opportunities offered by a good crisis.” In other words, a downturn can be a great time for innovation, to launch new products.

People at U of M seem to believe just that. And, as the economic crisis continues to take its toll, faculty, students and investors alike believe that now more than ever is the time for innovative students, forward-thinking developers and young dotcom entrepreneurs to come up with ideas that could lead to opportunities to launch new ventures.
Here’s the truth: There are two sides to Ann Arbor. One ordinary, the other one just…waaaaaay out there.
On one hand I find the city and the landscape to be as ordinary America can be: hotels and stores and fast-food restaurants and car dealerships and office complexes and Macy’s and Dunkin Donuts and malls, most buildings cropped ruler-straight, long and low, distributed in the spread-out style of American suburbs architecture…
And then you enter the Wolverines campus and that ordinariness ends. Suddenly, you can’t predict what the next corner will be like.

In fact, nothing quite prepares you for the culture shock of the University of Michigan. No matter where you turn on campus, another surprise beckons you:

Wearing a huge can-you-believe-it grin, Sabina and I stumbled upon one of the creators of “Magic Bus,” a system intended to track all university busses on campus via embedded GPS locators; it exists now as a functional beta website that, through real-time bus tracking on street maps and up to the second timing predictions, allows users to estimate their bus’s arrival time. This is especially convenient in the winter.

We sat down with the developers of a site-specific, cell phone-embedded video game, customized for the social life of students, with- virtual and real component that requires human interaction in order to proceed; the game seeks to promote the sentience of real-time, real-place encounter and bridge the gap between online interaction with people and offline, face-to-face interaction.

We also talked to the wizard-level programmers of an iPhone interactive application that sends a daily “do good” deed; after doing the deed, the application allows users to digitally tag stories of their experiences with text and images. Direct contact and direct feedback. For example, yesterday’s deed was “Today, shop locally,” another one was “get in touch with someone in your community you haven’t talked to in a long time” (And one user told the story of how he contacted his father whom he hadn’t talk to in three years).

The application as been out for less than a week and already has a couple thousand followers.
Overall there were a few things that struck me:

1. All these technologies ultimately sort themselves out around the idea of people, place and community.

2. The overall goal is to boost a local business economy by providing community content and applications. In fact all these technologies ultimately adapt to what the people and the industries of a college campus/town are really about: visual, local, tangible.

3. All these students, these young people, these developers, programmers, entrepreneurs, they all live by the same motto: If you can imagine something, you can build it.

4. Most of the work took place in the barren basement of a sprawling campus garage. It’s a plain-looking four-story red-brick structure. Inside, communal aspects of digital culture runs deep; in fact, it looks like any other high tech college startup, an ecosystem of innovation trying to make its mark in software, electronics, biotech, or energy: bicycles lean against the whiteboard-covered walls; under the computer-stuffed tables, wastebaskets overflow with empty coffee cups and Coca Cola cans. It is here that these young entrepreneurs spend three-quarters of their typical workday, brewing their next big idea, harnessing new technologies. Trying to rebuild the world.

The thing that’s really amazing is that the university seems to be on its own. By that I mean that, unlike Berkeley or Stanford, for example U of M doesn’t have a love affair with Silicon Valley and thus, doesn’t have Palo Alto’s network of resourceful and ambitious investors and ample financing to rely on. Instead the university serves as a feeder to struggling industries in a struggling state…

But I’m not going to talk about that neither.