retrofit

It fits into a wheel hub and can double a car's fuel economy. That's the claim of Dr. Charles Perry, who says his plug-in hybrid retrofit kit can save America 120 million gallons of fuel per day. Big talk. But then, inventors betting on revolutionary uphevals need to talk as big as they think. The former IBM electrical engineer designed the kit to transform existing automobiles into hybrids by placing an electric motor inside each wheel. Perry recently took first prize for his invention at a green energy competition at the Tennessee Technology Development Corp.

I live in a hundred year-old house where most everything is original: the windows (drafty), the walls (uninsulated), the furnace (burns oil). I need only look at my heating bill every month to deduce what the Commission for Environmental Cooperation has determined through a two-year study—homes and office buildings in North America account for over one-third of the continent's greenhouse gas emissions. They are terribly inefficient.