“It’s simple,” Gadget assures me.
“Simple enough that I could do it?”
Reverend Gadget's electric gospel: ''If electric cars are going to make a difference, a lot of people have to drive them. They have to be affordable.''
Straight outta Earl Scheib: Gadget's candy-coated electric-powered streamlined baby. Standing by, Left Coast partner Roger Wilson.
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“You need to know how to do a little welding,” he advises, and promises to teach me the next time I come by.
Gadget prefers to work with what he calls “Arcane British Cars, or ABCs — Triumphs and MGs and Austin Healys.” He picks them up at auctions for $200 to $300. “We’ll be converting those, and we’ll sell them on the lot,” he says, for the price of a new Prius ($25,000 to $30,000). But Left Coast also has modularized kits ready to drop into Mazda Miatas and Chrysler PT Cruisers for the “build-it-yourself market.” With NiMH batteries, he can guarantee a range of 60 to 100 miles. And one day, he adds, “We’ll move on to lithium ions.”
Most electric-vehicle enthusiasts regard lithium batteries as the answer to the range issue that has burdened public perception of electric vehicles. Cocconi already uses them in the tZero.
“Lead acid sucks,” Wilson tells me. “They’re miserable.”
But lithium costs exponentially more. “With a lead-acid battery pack,” Wilson says, “if you spend $1,500, you get a range of 25 miles; with nickel-metal hydride, for $6,000 you get a range of 60 to 100. With lithium, you spend $20,000, but [get a] 200-mile range. Lithiums are bitchin’, but they’re just not really available yet. So everybody’s stuck with lead-acid batteries.”
The way Wilson sees it, the battery issue is something the original EV1 project could have addressed with the same resources GM put into fighting California law. “There was a point when they decided we can throw $6 million at lobbying against the zero-emission mandate and be able to say we no longer have this mandate, or we could spend $6 million at battery research and meet the standard. Which one do you think they picked?”
But battery development, although loaded with politics and undeserved patents — the Texaco-owned Ovonics once sued Toyota over its use of NiMH batteries in the Prius — still crawled forward.
“We have a lithium manufacturer, A123, who’s talking to us about how to make lithium batteries more affordable,” says Gadget. “But until they’re available, if you set your car up with NiMH batteries, we have a one-voltage-type system,” meaning you can upgrade to lithium whenever you — or they — are ready. “We aim to be as standardized ?as possible.”
And as efficient. “We need to do 40 cars a year,” Wilson says, “and we can make money happily. That’s not much demand. Forty cars a year is cruising along. In two or three years, we’re planning to franchise operations and have people in other cities doing cars as well.” He also plans to extend Left Coast’s services to people who don’t buy kits. “We always say, if you have a question, call us. If you buy an electric car from someone else, we’ll help you. I want to get so many electric vehicles on the road that no one can ever again say there’s no consumer demand.”
On the Saturday afternoon that Who Killed the Electric Car? played the Los Angeles Film Festival, the Broxton Avenue parking lot next to the theater was given over to green cars, green-building ideas and even green cleaning products. A gleaming tZero was on the lot, as was Roderick Wilde, a tattooed biker type in a red bandanna. He was on hand to show off his electrified Graumann racing vehicle, “Gone Postal,” and told me he’s about to relocate to Croatia, where he’ll set up shop manufacturing high-end sports cars. Joe Gershen of Green Depot had set up a booth to explain the merits of running refined vegetable oil, or biodiesel, in ordinary diesel engines; Doug Korthof was holding forth from his own booth on the politics of grid-tied solar systems. But Gadget and Wilson, in sneakers and black T-shirts, Wilson’s mop of salt-and-pepper curls bouncing with his step, took up a significant chunk of space on the lot with their friends, selves and cars: Chong’s Ace, one step closer to completion, had a motor dropped in it, and the Sunbeam, well, it beamed — light glinting off its deep-grape polished exterior, its hood lifted to reveal a neat set of lead-acid batteries outfitted with circuit boards and connected with orange cables. People hovered around asking questions, and suddenly what once was a big idea seemed real. I asked Wilson if he was nervous. He said he wasn’t.
“We’re thinking small enough,” he said. “We’re not trying to be Starbucks and have a conversion on every corner. We’re not trying to take over the world. We’re just doing one car at a time.” He stopped to consider what he’d just said and made one adjustment: “We’re just saving the planet. One car at a time.”
