Reintroducing the American street boat, filth free

A Top Five for the year: the mad innovations being undertaken by car hacker Johnathan Goodwin in his Wichita, Kansas, shop, especially as told by popular tech-culture magazine writer Clive Thompson.

Goodwin is simultaneously a green fanatic and a muscle-car madman. The combination is as refreshing as it is uplifting and forces you (again) to curse the manufactured long-antagonism in this country between ecoheads and motorheads. Enough already of the intransigence! Grease monkeys are the key to our future! Reading about the stuff Goodwin’s been doing to major powerful cars—hummers, Jeeps, Lincoln Continentals, seventies muscle cars—gives you reason to believe the planet can be saved. The idea that there’s a way—something we imagined all along—that Americans can kick the filthy oil habit without having to do some impossible cultural gymnastics where we would all suddenly embrace train travel and tiny powerless cars… well, it’s a source of giddy hope!

This is Goodwin talking in Thompson’s FastCompany feature on him last month about the slow, gas-guzzling (eight miles per gallon) Hummer he’s transforming, making it a super-performing turbine-powered biodiesel hybrid:

“Conservatively, it’ll get sixty miles to the gallon—and with 2,000 foot-pounds of torque. You’ll be able to smoke the tires. And it’s going to be superefficient. Think about it: a 5,000-pound vehicle that gets sixty miles to the gallon and does zero to sixty in five seconds!”

Thompson celebrates the fact that Goodwin may be shaming incompetent Detroit execs into saving the American auto industry:

Goodwin is a virtuoso of fuel economy. He takes the hugest American cars on the road and rejiggers them to get up to quadruple their normal mileage and burn low-emission renewable fuels grown on U.S. soil—all while doubling their horsepower… If the dream is a big, badass ride that’s also clean, well, he’s there already. As he points out, his conversions consist almost entirely of taking stock GM parts and snapping them together in clever new ways.

“They could do all this stuff if they wanted to,” Goodwin tells me, slapping on a visor and hunching over an arc welder. “The technology has been there forever. They make 90 percent of the components I use.”

Last spring Goodwin converted a 1965 Chevy Impala to race a Lamborghini for an EarthDay episode of MTV’s “Pimp My Ride.” His Impala left the Lambo in the dust and “the only smoke it was seeing was from the tires,” he said. Now Goodwin has a host of celebrity clients, including Arnold the Governorator and Neil Young. Imagine all the hip-hop SUVs he’ll soon be pimping…

Ladies and gentleman, I give you Johnathan Goodwin: future Noble Prize winner and the next president of the United States!