KUOW72%
This Seattle inventor turned his Jeep into a hybrid. Now he wants to change the world 18%
By Joshua McNichols0%
7/2/2026, 6:54:45 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 32 faulty reasoning types, including Optimism Bias, Attempt to Sell a Product or Service, and False Dilemma, with Hasty Generalization as the most egregious example at 13.5% saturation with 267 hits. Analysis detected 2,659 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,971 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 33.5% and a BS Rank of 18% (17,387 of 21,197 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 82.00% of the article peer group.
Washington wants drivers to go electric.
A garage startup in north Seattle is betting the cheapest path runs through the cars people already own.
Washington is one of 17 states trying to break up with gasoline.
Officials want every new car sold here to be electric by 2035.
But so far, drivers are in no rush.
Nationally, only one in 10 new cars sold in 2025 was electric.
That’s because EVs are expensive and finding a place to plug them in can be a hassle.
Meanwhile, gas isn’t cheap either.
Even with prices down from their May 2026 high, the cost of a full tank of gas is still 50% higher (U.S. average) than it was before the war with Iran.
One Seattle inventor has come up with a workaround: a simple way to convert gas cars to plug-in electric hybrids.
But first, a caveat: The cheapest way to quit driving gas cars is to sell your car and ride public transit.
But that dream is impractical for many, given how far apart things can be in American cities like Seattle.
For more than a century, cheap gas has kept the cost of commuting low.
That’s allowed cities to spread out more than they could have afforded to without that subsidy.
A trip to this reporter’s in-laws’ house just south of Des Moines takes 38 minutes in his beat up 2009 Honda Fit.
The same trip by public transit would take 2-3 hours, depending on time of day.
Without that family car, the grandparents would have seen their grandchildren far less over the years.
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Doing that trip in an electric car instead would require more money up front.
A new electric vehicle starts between $30,000 and $60,000.
A new car of any kind now averages over $50,000.
Meanwhile, 99% of the cars out there are still gas powered.
And many of them run just fine, and will continue to do so for decades, sucking down gas and pumping out CO2 all that time.
Tom Gurski thinks there’s a way out of that trap.
And he's working on a prototype for a gas-to-electric conversion kit that can spread his solution all over the world.
Gurski is a mechanical engineer who trained at MIT and spent 25 years turning new technology into real products.
His inventions included a machine for the Gates Foundation that emptied pit latrines in the developing world.
In 2020, he founded a startup called Blue Dot Motorworks out of his North Seattle garage.
His invention keeps the gas motor and adds a second, electric motor.
The car can run on either, depending on its charge.
Plug it in overnight from a regular wall outlet, do your around-town errands on electricity, and switch it over to gas if you run out of power on a longer trip.
The proof of concept is parked at his shop: a 2001 Jeep Cherokee he sacrificed to the cause.
"This was my personal 2001 Jeep Cherokee.
Absolute peach of an engine.
They'll go half a million miles easy," Gurski said.
“I love this Jeep," he continued.
"I do Jeepy things on the weekend.
But driving to work every day, I'm getting 12 miles to the gallon.
That's just untenable."
Climb inside and it looks like an ordinary Jeep.
It’s got the same knobs, same speedometer.
But on the dashboard, there’s a custom control panel with a tangle of wires coming out of it and one feature that stands out like a bright red clown nose.
“Oh, that’s just the ‘oh crap’ button,” Gurski said.
It cuts power to the electric motor, like throwing the car into neutral.
He explained it was a temporary feature for prototyping only.
“Because I’m a mechanical engineer, not an electrical engineer, I wanted to make sure there’s a fail-safe in there in case anything does go wrong,” he said.
The whole rig has a charmingly homemade quality.
The electric motor hangs below the chassis looking a bit like a garbage disposal, attached to a motorcycle chain that turns the driveshaft.
But the core idea works.
Gurski says the converted Jeep averages 95 miles a gallon, because most of his daily driving happens on electricity and he only burns gas once in a while.
“Being able to retrofit something like this and do that daily commute on electric power, but still be able to go out to the wilderness at the same time, is fantastic,” he said.
Gurski plans to sell a conversion kit that’ll cost $6,000-10,000, including installation.
The cheaper version is for cars, the more expensive option is for trucks.
Those costs are roughly 20% of the cost of a new entry-level plug-in hybrid sedan.
Batteries for fully electric cars are notoriously expensive, often well over $10,000.
Even with battery prices coming down, for some vehicles, a ruined one can mean the car is totaled.
Gurski's price is possible because his battery is tiny: about a fifth of the size of the battery in a full electric car.
The tradeoff is that it only goes 35 miles on a charge before you have to switch over to gas.
For a lot of drivers, that’s plenty of room for a grocery run, a school pickup or a commute.
Plug it in every night and you might not use a drop of gas all week.
“You get 80% of the benefit using 20% of the batteries if you go the plug-in hybrid route,” Gurski said.
For the math to work, your car has to land in a goldilocks zone.
If it’s too new, you may not want to drill a hole into a car you just paid a fortune for.
If it’s too old, it may not be worth sinking thousands into a vehicle on its last legs.
Then there’s the question of whether it pencils out.
Don MacKenzie offered a reality check.
He’s the Allen and Inger Osberg Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington, where he leads the Sustainable Transportation Lab.
Gurski's idea, he said, runs against most of the research.
"The conventional wisdom is that retrofits are expensive, don't typically pay off, and the most cost-effective way to decarbonize the transportation sector is to invest in the new cars," MacKenzie said.
Old cars tend to get driven less, which makes the payback harder to achieve.
He said the scientific literature suggests it’s best to let them age out and get scrapped.
But after hearing about Blue Dot Motorworks, he said, "If someone has a winning solution, it's awesome that they're working on bringing it to market.
I love to hear about something that disrupts the conventional wisdom and overturns it as well.
I would love to see how this works out for him and for the customers."
After all, that's what startups do: Find a place where conventional wisdom is wrong or has overlooked something, and place a bet on a solution.
A big part of whether a conversion makes sense for any given individual comes down to where you live, and the gap between what you pay for gas and what you pay for electricity.
Washington state is a sweet spot for conversions, with pricey gas and cheap power.
But even within the state, the spread is huge.
"Here in Seattle, we're paying about 13 cents per kilowatt hour," MacKenzie said.
"If you go out to Chelan County, it's under three cents.
So your cost per mile to drive an electric car in Chelan County is about one cent per mile versus about four cents in Seattle."
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The same logic explains why conversions might make sense in Washington but flop in California or Hawaii.
Gas is more expensive in those states, but electricity costs far more than in Washington, so the spread is smaller and the payback slower.
It also depends on how many of your trips are short versus how many tap into the gas engine to extend the trip.
Gurski is targeting owners of cars in a goldilocks zone where the tech would pay for itself within two to three years, starting with fleet vehicles, then moving on to his 130-customer waitlist.
Washington state once had an enforceable rule requiring all new cars to be zero-emission by 2035.
But that law was based on California’s version, and in 2025 the federal government revoked the permission California needed to enforce it.
So in Washington, "our mandates turned into targets," MacKenzie said.
That makes the cars already on the road matter even more.
Gurski’s pitch is that the world will keep making cars for decades, and even in the rosiest scenarios, there will be roughly 500 million too many of them on the road to hit global climate targets.
Cleaning up cars we already own, he argues, is the “missing link.”
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He’s not the only one chasing affordable, climate-friendly driving options.
A Michigan company called Slate is bringing a bare-bones electric truck to market for about $25,000.
It’s so bare-bones that even the windows are hand cranked (electric windows are an upgrade).
Chinese automakers are building EVs in every shape and size, though tariffs, shipping costs, and safety certification mostly keep them out of the U.S.
The Slate Truck would be fun to drive, but compared to a conversion, even that cheapest of electric vehicles looks expensive.
Open the country to China's $7,000 electric mini-cars, and Blue Dot's $6,000 conversion kit could face some steep competition.
Which brings us back to this reporter’s 2009 Honda Fit.
The engine’s still humming, and with just 80,000 miles on it, it’s only 25-30% of the way through its legendary 200,000- to 300,000-mile lifespan.
But the paint’s a mess, and the weatherproofing leaks here and there.
The AC doesn’t work, even after hundreds of dollars in repairs last summer.
And Kelley Blue Book says it’s worth maybe $3,000 resale.
We already know how to figure out how much it costs to drive it using electricity versus gas.
But there's another kind of math to consider: How long does this extend the life of the car?
So let’s math it out.
The reporter drives an average of 4,700 miles a year, based on past habits.
An estimated 75% of those miles are spent making short trips that could run on electricity alone.
The gasoline engine itself is off during that time, or at least it will be when Blue Dot Motorworks adds a planned air conditioning upgrade to its kit (AC won't be included in the first kits to ship).
That leaves 1,175 miles per year for the gasoline engine to handle.
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Converting the Honda Fit to a plug-in hybrid would give this reporter a beater that gets 136 miles per gallon with an engine that lasts another 102 to 187 years.
Of course, there are lots of other things that can go wrong on a car besides an engine failure.
But by the time the engine wears out, assuming the body hasn't rusted to pieces, nobody will remember how to drive without a robot chauffeur.
And this Fit has a stick shift.
By the year 2213, driving a manual car from a stopped position on a steep Seattle hill will be a forgotten craft, like churning butter or fixing a rotary phone.
Try doing it without rolling back into the robot driver behind you.
<strong><em>Here this and other stories like this and others on Booming, KUOW's economy podcast:</em></strong>
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