received, indicate that the real effort of the automotive industry has been in the direction of improved combustion, the so-called clean-air package for positive crankcase fuel control and the like.

Whatever happened to the ideas that were advanced some years ago for afterburner-type attachments, or catalytic exhaust and muffler systems to reduce these contaminants after they were discharged into the exhaust system?

Mr. FERENCE. Apropos of the part of your question that concerns catalytic mufflers, we and I am talking now about our research organizations are very bullish about the possibilities for these devices long range. As a matter of fact, we believe that in order to attain the values that I have just described, we may not only have to have improved combustion techniques in the engine itself, but we will have to add perhaps a thermactor to get rid of one species of exhaust. This in turn could be backed up by some type of catalytic muffler.

At the present stage of the game, the life of catalytic mufflers, with the kinds of fuels being used, is quite limited.

Approximately 8 years ago, thereabouts, we came up with a vanadium pentoxide catalytic muffler to reduce the unburned hydrocarbons. This device came out of our research laboratory, and it was an excellent selective catalyst for unburned hydrocarbons. However, the requirements were changed to include carbon monoxide. This being a selective device, it did not respond at all to the carbon monoxide.

We are back on that same track now, reexamining, in view of new ideas, new knowledge, the probability of catalytic mufflers.

Senator BAKER. Without unduly prolonging this line of inquiry, one last wrap-up question.

I assume all these things are some distance in the future, and they ultimately and hopefully will lead to an emission level that is acceptable even in the worst areas, such as Los Angeles. And, I assume from your testimony, that you worked on electric concepts, too. They are both in the future.

Which will we get to first, the practical electric car, or the practical, clean, gasoline engine?

Mr. FERENCE. I think the latter, first.

Senator BAKER. Would you care to speculate on the times for either one of them?

Mr. FERENCE. Since it is in the research area, that would be a tough one for me. I feel strongly from the kind of effort that is going on in this area, and the kinds of problems to be overcome, that we will solve the air pollution problem from our internal-combustion engine before we have large-scale practical electric cars.

This would be my thinking.

Senator BAKER. Are we talking in terms of 10 years?

Mr. FERENCE. Ten years. That is the order of magnitude.
Senator BAKER. Thank you.

Senator PASTORE. Are there any further questions of the witness? If not, thank you very much, sir.

We have several Members of Congress, here, I understand. The first is Senator Pell.

Senator Pell, it is always a delight to have you before this committee. You may proceed.

STATEMENT OF HON. CLAIBORNE PELL, À U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF RHODE ISLAND

Senator PELL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I like to be here with you, under your guidance.

Mr. Chairman, I thank you for this opportunity to come here today to express my enthusiastic support for the underlying concepts of both of these bills, and to congratulate you for taking this very important initiative in the public interest.

My own interest in this matter stems from my concern for general improvement in transportation systems for urban areas. While my primary concern is for the improvement of railroad passenger service in areas like the great megalopolis stretching from here to Boston, I have become more and more convinced of the fact we must not make lopsided concentrations of effort on behalf of only one mode of transportation, to the exclusion of others.

The public interest calls for coordinated progress in all types of transportation and for intelligent planning of intermodal relationships.

I have become increasingly impressed, too, with the fact that in achieving these coordinated advances, we must honor a basic national commitment to the concept of personal mobility. We believe that every citizen should have not only the right but the means, or at least access to the means, of going wherever he wants, and whenever he wants, and with the greatest possible degree of personal independence.

The physical manifestation of our commitment to this kind of personal mobility is the modern automobile, which as I said in my book, "Megalopolis Unbound," is truly the most marvelous instrument of personal mobility conceived since the domestication of the horse.

These hearings signify that we have reached a point, however, where our commitment to free automotive mobility has raised some very real questions of public policy. We are beginning to run out of clean air and urban road space and the automobile as we now know it is clearly the cause. I was appalled to find, in the course of my own research, that my own State's capital city, Providence, is one of a score of cities where automotive smog has been recorded at levels adverse to health for periods of several days on end. And I was also distressed to note that the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare estimates that our new Federal standards of automotive exhaust control probably will not be adequate by the 1980's, by which time our national automobile population may well have increased by about 40 percent.

I have been concerned also about the problem of sheer wastefulness involved in our present automotive society. Primarily, it is a problem of wastefulness of space because we do not have vehicles designed to do the job most people want them for, but by extension it becomes a problem of wasted time and wasted public and private expenditure as well.

To dramatize the point, I have calculated that there is enough seat space in our present national automobile "fleet" to enable the entire U.S. population to get into their cars simultaneously and still have plenty of space left over, not including old-fashioned rumble seats, to take in the populations of Canada and Mexico. And the glaring fo +

remains that this vast seating capacity is greatly underutilized. The national average of car occupancy in commuter traffic stands at about 1.3 people per car. Each of us, I am sure, underwrites daily the cost of transporting several empty seats back and forth to work.

The cumulative cost to the public is of far greater consequence. The fact is that vastly oversized and underutilized automobiles occupy great amounts of valuable public space-more than 200 square feetand the Nation is continuously building more roads, often through the costliest areas, to keep up with the need for more operating space for automobiles. In Los Angeles, for example, 60 percent of the land area of that city and its surroundings are devoted to the care and parking of automobiles, leaving the human population with about 40 percent to make do.

Our highways already cover an area the size of the State of West Virginia. The highways alone. And I am advised that we will probably pave over an additional area the size of the whole State of Connecticut before the end of this century.

All of these things mean, I believe, that the time has come for a concerted effort to redesign our automobiles along more practical and socially desirable lines. In fact, speaking as one who would like to actually operate and own a small electric automobile right now, if one were available, I would say that action is long overdue and we may fall behind unless we act fast.

When one inquires about buying a new car, an electric car, one finds that there is none in the market in the United States today and you have to go to Great Britain or Italy.

My own findings convince me that there is indeed a need for the development of a new kind of automobile which will not be powered by a combustion engine and will not pollute the air, and which will be intelligently designed to meet the need for personal mobility in an urban environment. I thus concur with the intent of Senator Muskie's bill that a prompt and substantial effort be made to cope with the urgent threat to national health posed by air pollution and that this should be a prime consideration in any research program for a new vehicle.

I also concur completely with Senator Magnuson's proposal that there is a need to redesign the entire vehicle from the ground up, and I believe that the interests of public health, safety and overall economy, could best be served in this framework.

The results of Federal activity in this field may very well be a mass production of a new kind of specialized vehicle, different from anything we know today, powered by electricity, with seats for only two people or maybe three, and capable of operating with moderate speeds and range limitations. It would be charged each night by being plugged in like an ordinary electric iron to the electricity outlet, presumably the electricity being generated more and more cheaply through the use of nuclear power with which, Mr. Chairman, you are far more familiar than anybody else in this body.

I would also hope that the research would be wide ranging and that it would extend to all possible variations of such vehicles.

It seems to me, for example, that there are exciting prospects for devising automobiles or vehicles which could run independently on

neighborhood streets, and then be combined with others in an automated trunk line movement that would be highly efficient and safe. One of these automobiles was demonstrated in the New Senate Office Building garage a few days ago and I have a picture of it in my book. There are interesting possibilities, too, of changing the pattern of ownership of such vehicles so that the average family will not have to budget so much money for transportation. We might find, for example, that so-called urbmobiles of the future lend themselves to a system of rentals from central sources, permitting their use by different drivers at economy prices during the off peak hours.

I believe the best job of private research in this field was done by the Cornell study which I am sure has been studied by this committee, and an abstract of which I imagine would be incorporated in the record.

Whatever the results, it seems to me there would still be an important and significant role for the internal combustion automobile as we know it, particularly for long-range driving and for rural and recreational use. In fact the development of specialized urbmobiles for city use will permit the increased specialization of the standard automobile for other purposes.

I think as we look ahead and take a city like New York, which is on an island, where the population is very dense, we will probably see within a very few years the time comes when there will be a prohibitive tax placed on the entrance into that city of automobiles, particularly of internal combustion automobiles.

From the exclusion of personal automobiles in New York, I think one will find that this exclusion may well spread to the core areas of other cities.

Finally, Mr. Chairman, I would like to read into the record, if I may, a few brief paragraphs of my own book, which sum up my conclusions on this matter:

I would say that we are only about halfway to the full flowering of the automotive age.

We are now at the stage where we have created about as many problems as we have solved. We have gained immense benefits in personal mobility and convenience, but at enormous public costs in lives lost, dollars spent, health impaired, and time and space wasted.

Now we should concentrate on putting into effect the logical technological and public policy steps that will help us get maximum use from our automotive facilities. And we should proceed to redesign the automobile to accommodate the needs of our society.

To do so will require time and public expense and adaptation to change; it cannot be achieved overnight. Our need is to preserve the essential freedom and flexibility that the automobile has brought us but at the same time to develop and, if necessary, rebuild the machine to meet the specifications of our new mass society.

I thank you for letting me appear at this time, Mr. Chairman. Senator PASTORE. Thank you for a very, very excellent statement. Senator Griffin?

Senator GRIFFIN. I have no questions.

Senator PASTORE. Thank you very much, Senator Pell.

Senator PELL. Thank you.

Senator PASTORE. We have Congressman Ottinger as our next witness.

STATEMENT OF HON. RICHARD L. OTTINGER, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF NEW YORK

Mr. OTTINGER. Mr. Chairman, distinguished members of this joint committee, I appreciate the opportunity to testify before this joint committee on one of my favorite subjects, the electric car. It is doubly a pleasure because of the official attitudes I encountered when I introduced the first electric car legislation in the House in the 89th Congress. It was the distinguished chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee who first drew my attention to the potential of the electric vehicle when I was searching for a feasible solution to the serious problem of air pollution from the internal combustion engine. The more I looked into the matter, the more intrigued I became with the potential, but, when I introduced my House bill, most of the officials I talked with deprecated the idea as visionary and warned that there would never be hearings.

Well, they were wrong about the hearings, and I know from personal experience that the idea is not visionary.

During the week of January 16, I commuted to and from my office here in Washington in a model electric and it was a wholly satisfactory experience.

The car was capable of cruising at 55 miles per hour and had a range of more than 70 miles on one charge from an ordinary house outlet. Its acceleration was from zero to about 30 miles per hour, as fast or faster than the average small car. I have been informed that it cost about 10 cents to recharge from zero to full. And almost all the maintenance costs necessary for today's internal combustion engine car would, of course, be eliminated. There is no need for gas or oil. There is no differential, no transmission, no carburetor, no radiator to care for. The only parts that need to be maintained are the brakes and the tires. Furthermore, it was absolutely silent, which is no small factor in an age where noise pollution has become a serious problem in our cities.

I am forced to comment here that, as I listened to the testimony of the witness from the Ford Motor Co. I got the distinct impression that he was damning the electric vehicle with the faintest praise. I have the highest regard for Ford and drive one of their products, but from personal experience, I don't think they are giving the electric a fair shake in their testimony here. The experience that I had with the electric vehicle I drove was a very exciting and satisfactory experience indeed. The car I drove is no secret development. It is an experimental vehicle put together by the Yardney Co., which makes the batteries at the present time for the Polaris missiles and Titan missiles, submarines, and the F-105 aircraft. The car uses batteries that are standard equipment in the F-105 aircraft. The Ford people are aware of it. In fact, they have a contract with Yardney as a part of their excellent research program in electric vehicles.

The cost figures on the battery provided by Yardney--which makes them and sells them to the Government--were not $4,000, indicated by the witness from Ford, but a figure much closer to $2,000. Furthermore, the major factor in this cost is silver, which the witness from Ford failed to point out is completely retrievable.