Kos' frontpage diary repeated a great story about an 8th grade educated car mechanic doing what Detroit claimed was impossible - green cars that do 100 mpg and little polution. It sounds too good to be true, that kos "had to do additional research to confirm that it was indeed true."
Well, a little more research shows that it is indeed too good to be true. Details below the fold.
First of all, Goodwin is the cofounder of an alternative fuel company named "SAE energy." From its website, you can find a link to another company called "hlineconversion.com" which leads you to this glowing article about the new technology that Mr. Goodwin brings us.
Here is the relevant part that started my investigation:
When the green machine covered a quarter mile in about 12 seconds it caught a lot of attention. Rap artist Dr. Dre offered to purchase the vehicle dubbed the "Bio Rocket," and Tobias and Schwarzenegger were in attendance for the race during the final day of the PMR shooting. Both are having their personal vehicles converted by Goodwin this summer. "Governor Schwarzenegger came right up and started talking to me about the conversion, and I introduced myself as the person who had done it," Goodwin says. "The next thing you know we were over there talking about his Jeep Grand Wagoneer and we are now in the middle of negotiations on converting that." Goodwin is putting a Duramax diesel engine into a 2007 Cadillac Escalade EXT for Tobias, and adding his patented ethanol fuel injection technology that will allow the car to get 30 mpg and add 110 percent horsepower to somewhere around 800, conservatively, Goodwin says. The vehicle will have a number of customized changes, including no chrome parts, he says.
Ok, so Mr. Goodwin has a patent on ethanol fuel injection technology. So I went on the official website of the US Patent Office to search this magical patent. First try, using "Johnathan Goodwin" as the inventor, found zero hit. Second try, using "SAE Energy" as the assignee, again zero hit. Third try, using "ethanol fuel injection" for "any field", I got one hit, an invention titled "hybrid electric vehicle," by Hideo Kawamura of Isuzu Ceramics Research Institute Co., Ltd. As a last attempt, I searched "patent applications" in addition to "issued patents," still no luck. There was only one hit under "ethanol fuel injection," an invention titled "Control strategy for engine employing multiple injection types" that came out of (where else) Detroit!
Googling Goodwin yielded only the blog posts about this story, little else. It seems that either Mr. Goodwin does not have a "patented ethanol fuel injection technology," or that technology did not pass the scrutiny of the US patent office.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The claim of 100 mpg is extraodinary. The evidence so far seems not to confirm this claim.
Update. There seems to be some confusion on how I did the search. The searches are done separately, not together as some people have thought. The first search was with "Johnathan Goodwin" as the inventor - no other qualifications. So if anyone named "Johnathan Goodwin" owned any patent, whether on automobile or horseshoe painting, it would produce a hit. Likewise, the second search was with "SAE Energy" as the assignee, again, if SAE Energy ever owned any patent on anything, it should show up. I got zero hits on both searches. In other words, it is safe to conclude that neither Mr. Goodwin nor SAE Energy own any patents, on anything.
Update II. I called SAE Energy as people here suggested. The woman (Mary) replied that there was no patent. It's a pending patent application. When I asked who the inventor was, she replied that it was not Mr. Goodwin, but Larry Urry wo is the cofounder of SAE Energy. When I asked for patent application number she said that she doesn't have it and had to get it from the patent lawyer.
I did a search of pending patent applications using the inventor name "Urry." That landed me 15 hits. But none relates to automobile technology. It is clear that Mr. Urry does not yet have a pending patent with the US patent office.