I hate paying so much at the pump but I am glad that the current gas shortage has stabbed a dagger into the heart of SUV sales.  It also seems like every other day there is a news story about someone tinkering with their engines, or the battery array in their hybrids, to get more juice for the buck.  Sometimes innovation still does take place in the trenches.  Popular Science tells the story of Somender Singh and his relentless pursuit of perfection:

India is booming. The expanding population has overwhelmed the Bangalore-Mysore road the way a river floods its banks, and the flow of two-way traffic is choked with a living history of human transportation. There are belching herds of diesel trucks, diesel buses and iron-framed diesel tractors. There are wooden-wheeled carts pulled by brightly painted Brahma bulls, and two-stroke-motor rickshaws fueled by kerosene or cooking oil or whatever else is flammable and cheap. There are mopeds and bipeds and bicycles and motorcycles, and every conceivable type of petrol-powered, internally combusting automobile, from doddering Ambassador cabs to gleaming 16-valve Mercedes miracles. But there’s only one car like the one Somender Singh and I are riding in right now.

That’s because Singh invented it. Or rather, reinvented a piece of it: a small detail on the engine that he calls “direct drive.” He claims that his invention makes an engine cleaner, quieter and colder than its internal-combustion cousins around the world—while using up to 20 percent less gas.

“Some people say to me, ‘Singh, why are you wasting your time on such a thing?’” he yells, his singsong Indian English barely piping above the tooting traffic. “But I tell you sir—I tell the world: I have conquered the internal combustion engine!”

To hear Singh tell it, his story has all the makings of a Bollywood movie, a classic heartwarmer about a small-fry Indian grease monkey who challenges the big boys armed only with a dream and a dirty wrench. And there’s no doubt that he has come up with something new, at least in the eyes of the U.S. Patent Office. But has a potbellied philosopher- mechanic from Mysore really discovered the efficiency El Dorado sought by every auto manufacturer, R&D center and thermal engineer from Detroit to Darmstadt?

Geez.  Does every story out of India have the makings of a Bollywood movie?  We could get 6-fingered Hritik Roshan to play Singh and the story can play up the fact that his extra finger allowed mechanical modifications not capable by lesser men.  Still, Singh does lead the life that every engineer secretly dreams of.  He is a fearless tinkerer who doesn’t accept that good ideas are only born in the R&D labs of large companies.  The majority of the article actually focuses on his utter frustration in getting noticed.  Heads of state, large automobile companies…nobody will listen to the man.

…Singh wrote letters—dozens upon dozens of letters, each accompanied by an 8 x 10 glossy of his spark plugs. He wrote to presidents Clinton and Bush, to no effect. He wrote to Tony Blair and got a nice thank-you form on 10 Downing Street stationery. (“The British are a different lot,” he says proudly. “They respond to a letter.”) He wrote to President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam of India and received a series of letters and promises for follow-up, none of which bore fruit. He wrote to auto manufacturers from Dearborn to Pune, from Ford to Tata Motors. Tata, an Indian car company, expressed interest in the vague, noncommittal way that Singh had come to recognize as a mannered blow-off; Ford responded with a note wishing him “good luck,” which Singh didn’t much like, and the recommendation that he submit his “suggestion” through the company’s dedicated Web site (fordnewideas.com), which he liked even less.

The scientists’ replies were more compact. He claimed to have conquered the internal combustion engine? Using poor fuel on engines of antiquated design, evaluated without scientific instruments and in third-world conditions? Had he tested the design for 500,000 miles, they wondered, as a proper R&D lab would? He hadn’t—none of his modified engines had done more than 65,000 road miles. Had he tested it on non-Indian vehicles or with the kinds of fuel used in the developed world? (He hadn’t.) Had he put it on a proper dynamometer, tested horsepower and torque? (No, but there’s a reason….) Could he send them an official printout from a five-gas analyzer indicating the oxides of nitrogen and carbon and the unburned hydrocarbons and total fuel economy? In a word, no.

Slowly he was turning bitter, as all engineers that dream of fame, fortune, and beautiful women eventually do.   Then Tata finally came calling :

And then one day, the phone rings. It’s Tata Motors. The $3.5-billion Indian auto manufacturer, which supplies automobiles to Rover UK, has received one of his letters. The Tata engineers have seen his patent and examined the photograph of his spark plugs. And they’re interested. If he’s willing to sign a five-year nondisclosure agreement, they’ll test his design further in their lab in Pune—on a proper dynamometer, with permission and everything.