Utah duo create 'quadbrid' vehicle

Brent Singleton, a 17-year-old high school student from Washington Terrace, Weber County, plans to race his quadbrid on the Bonneville Salt Flats.

"Quadbrid"? What on the salt is that?

A vehicle that uses two types of fuel is a hybrid, which is what the Escort became after students at Weber State University modified it.

Brent's father, Kent Singleton, explained that in 1992, Ford donated 35 of the Escorts to learning institutions including Stanford and MIT so that students could compete on the problem of creating vehicles using more than one type of fuel. WSU's students installed electrical components so the Escort could run with either electrical or gas power, or both.

In the second year of the contest, Kent Singleton said of the Ogden university students, "They took first place. They beat all the big boys with all that money."

In 2001, Brent Singleton bought the vehicle from WSU. By then the car was partly dismantled and Brent restored it.

That year, the father-son team took it to time trials on the salt flats, where Kent Singleton ran it at 96 mph in hybrid mode. The Singletons claim the record for the first hybrid ever to race.

But having a hybrid wasn't enough for Brent. He added solar panels to recharge the batteries, making it what the father-son combo calls a "tribrid" car. Then he added wind generators: "quadbrid."

"The wind will turn the propeller. That's truly a generator, so it's producing electricity," Kent Singleton said.

A junior at Bonneville High School, Washington Terrace, Brent drives the car to school every day. "It just feels like a regular car, then when it's in hybrid mode it feels like a regular car with power," he said.

His dad added that with the wind-driven propellers, when the car sits in the school parking lot, the batteries are being recharged by wind. "It's the same thing with the solar panels, too," he added.

The two have searched the Internet and, while manufacturers are putting out hybrids, they have not found another tribrid, let alone a quad. Some all-electric cars have solar panels to recharge the batteries, but they doubt any other vehicle uses gas, electricity, solar and wind.

In 2001, when they first took the Escort to the salt flats, Brent could not not drive it because he wasn't old enough for a driver's license. So his dad drove the vehicle.