Alexander Severinsky thought he had escaped long waits for basic goods when his family fled the Soviet Union in 1978. But barely a year later he found himself in his Oldsmobile Cutlass, in the Texas heat, at the end of a line of cars waiting to gas up.
"I just came from Russia a year ago, where I stand in lines for food, and now what changed? I'm back in line, only for fuel," he said, laughing, in his accented English.
Better fuel efficiency, he reasoned, could boost gas supplies and end the lines. "So I decided to look into what is the problem with engines."
His 15-year quest led him to invent and patent a hybrid gasoline-electric automobile engine. A 1999 prototype, built with support from the University of Maryland and Baltimore's Abell Foundation, doubled the gas mileage on a Cadillac DeVille.
When Toyota introduced its redesigned Prius a few years later - without securing the right to use his patents - Severinsky sued. And like Robert Kearns, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper who battled Detroit's Big Three for stealing his idea, Severinsky won. A federal jury awarded his company $4.3 million, plus $25 for every hybrid car that Toyota builds until his patent expires.
The 2005 verdict against Toyota was a vindication for Severinsky, but maybe not as pleasing as peering under the hood of his Toyota-built Lexus hybrid SUV.
"I'm very happy," said Severinsky, who will be inducted Thursday into the Innovation Hall of Fame at the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering. "Close to a million cars with my technology on the streets. It is great honor for the inventor. Toyota already said all future cars will be hybrid, and this is absolutely correct."
He regrets that U.S. automakers, whom he tried to interest in his technology in the 1990s, have been so slow to catch up. "I expected it would be much faster," Severinsky said. "Coming from Russia, my impression of America is that it is a country of innovators. ... [The] automotive industry in the United States became very noncompetitive."
Severinsky's quintessentially American story began 64 years ago in the coal mining Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. His family moved there after World War II because there "was nothing to eat in Kharkov," he said.
Severinsky earned a doctorate in electrical engineering. He found work in the Soviet equivalent of the National Bureau of Standards.
