Listers,
The following article caught my attention. So who on the List is going to have
the honor of doing the first EV "conversion" of an Alpine or Tiger to electric
power?? $1.50 per commute & 85 mph. Hmmmmm. Let's see; $7000 for the
conversion. At $1.50/gal that's 4,667 gallons of gas. At 20 mi/gal that's
933,333 miles I could drive for $7,000 worth of gas. Factoring in the not
inconsequential cost of the electricity, it looks like I'd have to drive well
over 100,000 miles before I'd start saving money. But what about that EV
Smile?? I doubt that it's any broader than the smile Tiger drivers and
passengers alike exhibit every time they light up their fossil fueled beasts.
Bob
The EV smile
By Fred Whitridge
imagine my delight when my chum, the managing editor of Forbes Digital Tool,
pulled up at my house in his internally combusted '89 Volkswagen Cabriolet. I
imagined the look on his face as we drove, his neck snapping back from the far
better acceleration of my converted 120-volt DC-motored 1985 Cabriolet,
replete
in its racing livery from two American Tour de Sol electric car races.
Would he
ask the typical dumb questions like "How long is your extension cord? Does it
go faster than five miles an hour? Do you change batteries when you run out of
juice?"
No, he just smiled the "EV smile" as we backed noiselessly out of the garage.
"I was waiting for the engine to turn on," he laughed. The electric vehicle
smile is well known to EV drivers. It is an involuntary response from
passengers, which is part self-deprecatory, part knowing, and part
I'm-now-part-of-a-pretty-neat-club. What did he expect?
He had already ridden a converted bicycle and seen the '60's vintage GE
Elektrak lawn tractor I still have to begin work on. Both were quiet, both
nonpolluting. And still my EV lit him up with The Smile.
You can convert everything from Porsches and stretch VW vans to pickups and
rare antiques.
Unlike most EV users, I drive a conversion. Well, two actually. It all started
like this: After spending several winters in the garage my VW Cabriolet was
belching smoke so badly it looked as though I was going to have to junk it.
Instead, I decided to convert it into a EV. All it required was buying a kit
from Electro Automotive in Felton, Calif. The $7,000 kit included everything
that even a ham-handed mechanic like myself needed to turn it from a primitive
fossil fuel burner into an elegant, gliding car of tomorrow.
Today the Cabriolet propels me 40 miles on a single charge and can do 85 miles
per hour. It even has a radio. (And, no, in case you were wondering, I don't
notice the difference in range while I use the radio.) The best thing, of
course, is that I don't need gas stations. All I have to do is just plug it
into the 220-volt charger on my garage wall and it's ready to take me to work
the next day. The cost per charge for me in Connecticut is about $1.50.
There are about 3,000 licensed conversions rolling on the roads of America.
Everything from Porsches and stretch VW vans to pickups and rare antiques have
been converted. VWs seem to be popular because they are built like tanks, its
easy to find spare parts, and diesel models whose internal combustion engines
have expired can be had for next to nothing.
A basic conversion can take 100 hours and involves dropping the engine (but
saving the manual transmission), and ridding the "donor" vehicle of exhaust,
gas tank, and radiator before preparing it for the transplant of batteries and
a rather diminutive but powerful electric motor and controller. Total vehicle
weight may climb by 1,000 pounds or so with the addition of batteries--usually
lead acid. Often the increased weight will require suspension modifications
such as heavier springs.
A proper conversion needs little maintenance except for refilling the
batteries
with water once every couple months and even that may be unnecessary with
maintenance-free batteries. Otherwise, beyond the normal attention to the
brakes and a simple motor brush change every 80,000 miles or so, you are
rolling. Silently rolling, cleanly rolling, rolling by gas stations,
rolling...
External links:
Electro Automotive (http://www.geocities.com/MotorCity/1783/)
Robert L. Palmer
Dept. of AMES, Univ. of Calif., San Diego
rpalmer@ames.ucsd.edu
rpalmer@cts.com
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