Sonoma, California-
It's like a science fair at speed, as if you had cleared all those pasty-faced geeks out of the research-and-development laboratory and made them run on foot around a race track. There's hardly a sound, just the faint rustle of pocket protectors and the slap of running shoes on pavement, and then the sight of white lab coats fluttering weakly in the breeze.
This is Challenge Bibendum, the Indy 500 of clean air vehicles, a competition between every kind of green vehicle on our blue planet. There are more than a hundred vehicles in all, from city busses to pod-size people-movers, and lots of them are whistling around the 2.0-mile Infineon Raceway here at Sears Point at the breakneck pace of 45 mph. In the NASCAR garage area, you'll find a clean-air carnival, dozens and dozens of information booths from every little company hoping to cash in on the technology revolution that's underway in clean-air transportation. Some five-hundred journalists swirl through it all, speaking languages from the far corners of the world, including Chinese, English, French, German, and Italian. It's a clean-air extravaganza.
Five years ago, Michelin underwrote a modest rally of clean-air vehicles in France, and they were driven to the Champs Elysees in Paris from the tire group's headquarters in Clermont-Ferrand. Intended to be the first organized display of clean-air vehicles in real-world conditions, Challenge Bibendum caught the imagination of car manufacturers, media outlets, and government leaders. It also caught the imagination of Edouard Michelin, the tire company's 40-year-old CEO. He personally championed the event, and Challenge Bibendum unexpectedly took on a life of its own. The 2003 edition, held the last week of September, was designed to showcase clean-air technology for legislators and bureaucrats in nearby Sacramento, the capitol of California.
As with previous Challenge Bibendums, this event was partly a teach-in and partly a race. There were important presentations by leading experts in transportation, almost none of whom would otherwise be capable of commanding anyone's attention for longer than three minutes. There was a design competition--a beauty contest, really, in which there was an award for Style Advancement (the swimsuit portion) and Technical Integration (playing "America the Beautiful" on the accordian). There was an award for Frontal Crash Impact Safety, a recognition that clean-air vehicles can get smacked up in everyday use, and it would be useful if a phone call to an ambulance and a hazardous materials clean-up squad wasn't necessary every time it happened. Air emissions were also evaluated, and it involved hooking up a variety of complicated, multi-part sniffers to exhaust pipes in a way that reminded many media observers of a particularly uncomfortable visit to the doctor's office. ...next page >>