A new fuel in town

A company new to the automotive industry brings fresh ideas and products to the vehicle-electrification party.

Richard Lowenthal could have done worse in his attempt at starting a new company with an environmental component. And although success is far from guaranteed, he, his start-up company Coulomb Technologies, and his company's product (charging stations for plug-in hybrids and pure-electric vehicles) seem to have arrived on the scene at a fortuitous moment in a time of rapid change and uncertainty.

“When we started this business, global warming was really the driving force for moving to electric vehicles,” said Lowenthal, a self-described environmentalist-but not an “extreme one”-who drives a converted plug-in Toyota Prius. “But last summer, gasoline was about $4 a gallon. So right now I would say my primary driver, and I think the driver for the industry, is independence from foreign oil. We make electricity here in the United States, and we can run our vehicles on it. When we import oil, we fund foreign countries instead of our own. That leads to its own problems.”