“It’s been around for 100 years,” says Gadget, “but it’s still a good drive. It means we can’t do regenerative braking” — feeding the power from stopping the car back into the batteries, the way the Toyota Prius does. That’s because, he says, “high-performance DC motors make lousy generators.” Also, “we’re going to lose a couple of percent points in efficiency. But we have a system we can do for under $10,000. With the batteries, it’s 17 grand. For $30,000, we can do a Hummer.”
Even the idea of a conversion kit isn’t new: In Errington, British Columbia, Randy Holmquist, who started converting gas cars to electric vehicles in the 1990s because he wanted “a cheap way to get to work,” has been converting S-10 pickups for 16 years, at the rate of one to three a year. He sells kits for around $10,000 U.S., and installs them for another $4,000 (plus $2,000 for the batteries). “The Chevy S-10 is the best conversion on the market,” he says. “It’s designed so that it can hold the weight of the batteries. We put six batteries underneath the hood where the motor was and 18 in the truck bed. It’s real easy, and accessible.”
In the last five years, business had dropped so sharply that he let stock parts run out. But “in the last three months, we started getting orders again. In the last three months, we’ve sold five.”
He attributes the renewed interest not just to higher gas prices but to public exasperation with the oil business in general. “We used to get calls from people wanting a cheap way to get to work,” he says. “Now it’s ‘I’m tired of the oil companies making tons of money on me. I want out.’ It’s not ‘How do I save money?’ anymore. It’s ‘I don’t want to support the oil industry and I don’t care what it costs.’ ”
Not all cars made to run on gas convert easily to electric vehicles. “Some of them need so many batteries,” says Holmquist, “they exceed the legal weight limits for cars.” But for the vehicles that work, converting cars has both environmental and economic advantages over building new electric vehicles from the ground up. Twelve million automobiles pile into U.S. landfills every year, with just as many in Europe. Manufacturing a single car, says the Environmental Protection Agency, requires 40,000 gallons of water — nearly half the water the average family uses in a year. And as General Motors found out when it rolled out the fabled EV1, whose mysterious disappearance from the roadways is chronicled in Chris Paine’s new documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car?, developing a vehicle from scratch costs a billion dollars.
“And even after you spend that, you don’t have a car on the road for a decade,” says Gadget. “This way, if we do conversions, we’ve got them on the road right away.”
So far, Gadget and Wilson’s new company, Left Coast Conversions, has done four cars and a BMW motorcycle that was featured on Gadget's short-lived Discovery Channel show, Big. MTV is following the progress of Chong’s ride. Gadget and Wilson have raised one-tenth of the half million they need to go into full production, advance-ordering bulk parts and motor plates. But for now, they tackle custom projects one by one. Two other cars are lined up alongside the Olds waiting for their electric guts: a 1971 Triumph Spitfire and a 1991 BMW 535. Missing from the lineup today is Gadget’s own 1962 Sunbeam, which has been sequestered at Earl Scheib’s Body Shop to get spruced up for its public debut at the Los Angeles Film Festival premiere of Who Killed the Electric Car? Gadget has a cameo in the movie about the death of the elegant little EV1, as does Cocconi, who designed the controller for the Impact, the 1990s-era concept car upon which the EV1 was based.
The point of their presence in the movie is simple: If the big car companies won’t make electric cars, somebody else will. “I didn’t want people to feel like we always have to wait for major automakers,” Paine told me over the phone. “From the beginning of the car industry, people have been converting cars on their own; lots of mechanics have been doing things independently. I wanted to give a voice to those people.”
It was more than 100 years ago that the famed physicist and engineer Nikola Tesla wrote enthusiastically of the application of electrical power to the propulsion of automobiles; even before that, he had advocated harnessing the current produced by the steam or gas propulsion of marine engines and locomotives to improve fuel efficiency. “A gain of 50 to 100 percent in the effective energy derived from the fuel could be secured in this manner,” he wrote in a 1904 letter to the Manufacturer’s Record. “It is difficult to understand why a fact so plain and obvious is not receiving more attention from engineers.”
More puzzling still, in 2006, nearly all of General Motors’ research and development goes toward cars and trucks with internal-combustion engines; GM no longer has any research arm dedicated to electric vehicles. Its only alternative-fuel venture at the moment promotes corn-based ethanol, a fuel that, due to modern agricultural practices, takes as much energy — in the form of petroleum — to produce as it yields. This remains true even after some reliable experts, such as former Shell Oil analyst and geology professor Kenneth Deffeyes, reported that world oil production has already passed the peak predicted by geologist M. King Hubbert. “It’s real and it’s here,” writes Deffeyes in his book Beyond Oil. “Business as usual is not an option.” Meanwhile, for the past two decades, the U.S. Congress has so stubbornly refused to raise the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for U.S. automakers’ fleets that, as Al Gore points out in his movie An Inconvenient Truth, the Chinese now require car companies doing business in their country to meet fleetwide efficiency standards one and a half times as stringent as our own.
I personally feel that speeding or using an electric car for the purpose of its renowned torque, is just absurd. Electric cars were designed since years ago with the sole purpose to somehow contribute to anti-global warming efforts. Thus, if you use it to instead take advantage of its horsepower, it is like abusing its very existence. Well, at least that's just an opinion of one person.
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