Cont'd “I've been thinking about it for years now,” Willmon said. “When gas hit three dollars [a gallon] I decided to go ahead and do it.”
Willmon took out a loan to buy the truck, the batteries, and all the other parts he needed to make his vehicle run on electricity. He put 320 hours into the conversion over three and a half months - always at night after his kids were in bed. When he finished this May, he took the Electrabishi for a spin around his Bayshore neighborhood: “It was about two o'clock in the morning. I didn't have a hood on it or anything.” The next morning he took his kids to the store in the truck. Now he drives it to and from work every day.
Willmon's electric pickup can get 40 miles to a charge. His daily commute to work and back is 15 miles, so even with errands he's got plenty of juice left at the end of the day. And at night he just recharges the battery. There's a socket where he used to stick a hose to pump gas into his tank. It connects to 16 lead acid batteries that are connected to one another in the bed of the truck, totaling about 192 volts. Willmon uses an extension cord and plugs the truck into an outlet at his house, which costs him about 65 cents a night. The battery is fully charged after four hours.
Including the purchase of the used truck, the conversion to electricity cost Willmon about $12,000. He says he traded a $12,000 car loan for a $12,000 signature loan. He pays about 20 dollars more a month in electricity now, but he used to spend about $120 in gas each month.
Willmon is perhaps not the typical green driver. He wouldn't go to the trouble of converting his vehicle to electricity “just to keep from polluting,” he says - “but it's a nice benefit.” So is the fact that the Electrabishi is fun to drive. “It's a lot faster than it was with a gas engine,” he says. Despite being 1,000 pounds heavier with all those batteries in it, the little pickup has some oomph.
Willmon's wife still has a gas-powered vehicle, a van, which his family can use if they want to go away for the weekend. Still, if his family can ever afford newer, more expensive batteries that get more miles to the charge, Willmon says he'd convert his wife's car to electricity, too.
John Cooper, a Naval Mechanical Engineer in Juneau, says he wants to move away from gas-powered vehicles, too, although not for precisely the same reasons as Willmon's. Cooper said recently that he's hoping to convert an Eagle Summit to electricity sometime soon. The rising price of gas is one reason. The environment is the other. “I'm kind of a closet environmentalist,” he said.
“The number one reason to build an electric car is to promote clean air,” said John Wayland, of Portland, Oregon. Wayland built his first electric car in 1980. He still has it. “Twenty-six years without a drop of gasoline,” he said recently. Wayland is another member of the Electric Auto Association. He has two electric cars now - both converted from 1972 Datsuns. Wayland makes his living servicing electric forklifts for North West Handling Systems. He's given forklift training classes in Anchorage and he's due to go to Prudhoe Bay to train workers there in servicing their electric vehicles. But electric cars for him are more than an extension of his work and are about more than cleaner air.
“You can be politically correct and have fun as well,” Wayland said. Case in point: He drag races his electric Datsuns in Portland, often against gas-powered muscle cars - and wins, he says.
Some people may think of an all-electric car as an oddity, a blast from the future. They've been wondering when there will be some new, affordable technology to decrease our dependence on oil, ease up on our wallets and save what clean air we have left. They don't realize that technology is already here - and that it's been around for a long time.
As automobiles became common in the early part of the 20th century, there were both gas- and electric-powered cars. Gas cars smelled bad, required a crank to start and were expensive to fuel. Though electric cars couldn't go very far on a charge, the only real roads at the time were in cities and towns; no one could drive very far anyway. Automobiles were used mostly for local commuting.
As roads connected cities, people wanted to drive farther. Electric starters were invented, eliminating the loathed hand crank. When oil was discovered in the U.S., gas became affordable for the average consumer. And Henry Ford started mass-production of vehicles with internal combustion engines, making gas-powered cars more affordable. By the 1920s, electric cars could no longer compete. Individuals continued to build or convert their own electric cars, but a major motor vehicle company didn't produce electric cars again until 1996.
That's the year General Motors made available a new kind of car. The EV1, called the Impact when it first showed up as a concept car in 1990, was an all-electric car. It didn't use any gas. It also inspired California's Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate, which aimed to get auto manufacturers to build and sell vehicles that produced no emissions, as the state was facing a pollution crisis. By 1998, at least 2 percent of vehicles sold in California were to be zero-emissions vehicles; by 2001, 5 percent, and by 2003, 10 percent.
Toyota and other car companies also introduced all-electric vehicles to conform to the mandate. But they also sued the state of California, claiming its mandate regulated fuel economy standards, something only the federal government is allowed to do. By 2003, the California requirements were modified. New cars didn't have to be completely zero-emissions anymore and car companies were given more time to reach the goals. The all-electric cars were taken off the market.
GM spokesperson Dave Barthmuss said recently that the EV1 was discontinued because it didn't generate enough interest. Barthmuss said GM built about 1,100 EV1s and only about 800 were ever leased. A few hundred vehicles on the road over several years “does not a business make,” he said.
With its limited range and hours required to recharge, the EV1 “required too many trade-offs to make it a viable vehicle resource,” Barthmuss said. The car generated a “tremendous passion” from several hundred people, he added, but that wasn't enough to keep it in production. |
