By: Deb Dion
Usually when you talk about a person’s drive, you are referring to his ambition and not a road trip. In the case of Dennis Weaver, however, his drive encompasses both things.

Last October, Weaver and a small media crew traveled from Los Angeles to Denver in a car retrofitted to operate on 55 percent hydrogen and 45 percent ethers. The purpose of the trip was to promote alternative fuels. Weaver founded the Institute of Ecolonomics in 1993, and the promotional drive was one of the group’s biggest projects to date. For Weaver, who seeks to increase awareness about viable alternatives to this country’s voracious appetite for finite energy resources, the endeavor was a labor of love. “We need to free ourselves from our dependency on foreign oil,” Weaver says. “It makes us vulnerable. The whole purpose of the drive was to get people excited about energy alternatives...to show people, and let them see the technology in action.”

The excursion began as part of the annual Michelin Challenge Bibendum, where automakers unveil the electric, hydrogen or alternatively fueled vehicles that never seem to find their way into the marketplace. Weaver’s retrofit earned him an award at the event, which sponsored the drive from Los Angeles as far as Las Vegas, a distance some autos were able to travel without refueling. Weaver didn’t stop in Las Vegas, though. Anxious to show people that the technology exists for vehicles to use energy alternatives, the crew made pit stops all over the west, ending its trip at the Denver Clean Air Festival. Vehicles that run on fuel cells, burn hydrogen and release water as a by-product instead of toxic emissions are widely considered to be the future of the automobile industry, but the vehicles won’t be available to consumers for at least a decade. While vocational/technical students in Gallup, New Mexico, peered under the hood of the “alternative” car and took it for test drives, Weaver asked a teenaged Native American girl to translate the word “sustainability” in her language. He was surprised at the length of the translation. “She literally said ‘to walk softly on the Earth,’ which I thought was neat,” Weaver says. “It was exciting to see young people’s reactions to the project. Everywhere we went, there was very intense interest about what we were doing.”

Weaver said the Institute of Ecolonomics was buoyed by the success of the drive, and his group is planning a longer trip for 2003, which will originate again in Los Angeles and travel the California coast before heading across the country to Washington, D.C.

Telluride Visitor Guide