But he kept thinking about hybrid engines. Finally, his "flash of genius" came in the middle of the night: high voltage. A successful hybrid car, he realized, should mate its small, fuel-efficient gasoline engine with a small, high-voltage alternating current motor. The higher the voltage, the smaller the size and weight of the motor, and the higher its energy efficiency.
In 1991, he founded his hybrid engine company, Paice LLC. He won his first patents in 1994. They called for an electric motor of 500 to 1,500 volts - more than anything then in development.
Severinsky turned again to UM's business incubator. It let him rent campus space for offices and computer modeling. Faculty members helped him expand his ideas. The university, in return, got a 1 percent equity stake in the company for each year that Paice was in the incubator - about 4 percent in all. Without Mtech, "this would still be in fantasy stage," Severinsky said.
The incubator arranged meetings with potential investors, suppliers and federal agencies that might provide development funding. The companies included Martin Marietta, General Electric, Westinghouse, Chrysler and General Motors. Japanese carmakers were informed of the new technology, he said, but "we wanted to create this technology in the U.S."
The Abell Foundation became a key investor. Hybrid engines promised environmental benefits, noted Abell President Robert C. Embry Jr. And if Paice or its licensees began to manufacture something, Abell hoped that it would be in Baltimore.
In 1999, Paice built a prototype - a four-cylinder, 65 horsepower Suzuki engine married to a high-voltage electric motor. In dynamometer tests modeled on a Cadillac DeVille, it boosted gas mileage from 16 mpg with a V8 to 34 mpg with the hybrid.
But executives worried that a high-voltage car would be dangerous. Existing electric cars and hybrids, including Toyota's first Prius, a boxy compact introduced in 1997, ran on fewer than 300 volts - too little to make the cars commercially viable, Severinsky insists.
That soon changed. In 2003, Toyota introduced its wedge-shaped, 500-volt, midsize Prius. Paice sued in 2004, contending that the new Prius infringed on three patents and demanding $200 per car. Toyota denied any infringement. The advantages of high voltage were "obvious and well known," according to John Flock, one of Toyota's attorneys, but were not feasible until Toyota and GE developed critical electronic components.
