New technologies and new ways to combine them can yield cars that combine ultralight advanced-composite construction with hybrid-electric propulsion. Such ultralight-hybrid "hypercars" would be severalfold lighter and more slippery than today's cars; an order of magnitude more efficient; several orders of magnitude cleaner; an order of magnitude lower in product cycle time, tooling cost, assembly effort, and parts count; yet also safer, sportier, otherwise nicer, and probably cheaper. This technology fusion is likely to enter the market in the next few years through competitive mechanisms; is about to transform the auto industry (one-seventh of the GNP); will ultimately save as much oil as OPEC now extracts; could form the nucleus of a green industrial Renaissance; and will both require and complicate parallel reforms in transportation policy to reduce excessive automobility. Hypercars' challenges are not chiefly technological or economic but rather cultural and institutional, such as shifting manufacturers from hardware to software and from complexity to simplicity.

Amory Lovins, a physicist educated at Harvard and Oxford, cofounded and directs research at Rocky Mountain Institute, an independent, nonprofit resource policy center in Old Snowmass, Colorado 81654-9199. Lovins has published 22 books and several hundred technical and popular papers, and has received the Mitchell, "Alternative Nobel," Nissan, and Onassis Prizes and a MacArthur Fellowship. He has briefed nine heads of state and consulted for scores of leading industries (including Xerox), utilities, and governments worldwide. Newsweek named him "one of the Western world's most influential energy thinkers"; The Wall Street Journal's Centennial Issue, among 28 people in the world most likely to change the course of business in the 1990s. Lovins developed the hypercar concept in 1991-3 and currently works mainly on moving the car, utility, and real-estate industries toward advanced resource productivity.

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