For 25 years, Matti Holtzberg has been perfecting a car engine made of plastic, reports Don Sherman in the New York Times (10/25/09). It's not as crazy as it sounds. After all, "if modern plastics are sturdy enough for 600-mile-per-hour airplanes, why are car engines still made by pouring molten metal into molds, a 6,000-year-old process?" True, it's just airplane wings and fuselages that are made of plastics, but still. A plastic car engine would shave considerable weight -- as much as 30-35 percent -- from that of an aluminum engine. It would also "trim both material and machining costs."

Matti has also proved he can make the concept work. In fact, back in 1979, he re-built a Ford Pinto with an engine, known as a Polimotor, using "plastic for the block, piston skirts, connecting rods, oil pan and most of the cylinder head." Two years later, he built a "300-horsepower design weighing 152 pounds; a stock Pinto engine made 88 horsepower and weighed 415 pounds." He even "campaigned a Lola racecar" to prove the engine's worth (link), and "the only mishap during half-a-dozen 1984 and 1985 races was the failure of a connecting rod, a part purchased from an outside supplier."

Over the years, Matti has accumulated various patents related to plastic engines, and "views his composite casting technology as the next logical step in the evolution of the automobile, from wood, iron, and steel, to magnesium and advanced plastics." But car companies apparently still see plastic engines as risky, and in any case own the foundries used to supply "major aluminum power train castings." But Matti has now formed a partnership with Huntsman Corp., a major auto industry supplier, and hopes for a breakthrough "before internal combustion is finally superseded by electric propulsion."