Porsche 550 Electric Kit Car: On My Christmas List!

I don't know about you, but that doesn't make much sense to me when there's something that has been around in one form or another since about 1890 that would save me (and you!) a ton of money and get us out from under all the problems with fossile fuel in our gas tanks: the electric car!

Like most Americans, my commuter-mobile is a regular gas-powered car. I've got a Toyota Solara SLE convertible that gets about 26 miles per gallon for the mixed neighborhood/freeway driving that I do. Not great, but not terrible, either.

But I figure that I still wind up paying around $750 a year in gasoline at the current pump price of around $2.30 per gallon, just for my commuting miles.

It occured to me one day that this was really stupid - I'm just freakin' driving to work! Why should I have to pay nearly a thousand bucks a year (nevermind the gas price hikes that will come) just in gas? So I started looking around for other possibilities.

Now, I'd consider riding mass transit, but there aren't any options available for me (one of the perils of living in the 'burbs), and because of the schedule I work there aren't any real carpooling opportunities. So I'm pretty much stuck with driving to work, shelling out more and more money as the years go by for gasoline. And if you think the price of gas is going to do anything but go up as time goes on, you really need to read Plan B 2.0 by Lester Brown!

Think electric cars are just a pipe dream by garage tinkerers and would never work for you? Don't be fooled! Check out the movie Who Killed The Electric Car!

"What about hybrids?" you say.

Well, what about a hybrid car? I'd certainly love to see a hybrid vehicle (preferably with extra batteries, a plug-in charger, and flex-fuel capability) to replace our family van, because sometimes we drive long distances in that.

But for my ho-hum trips to work? Why should I have to burn any gas at all, or have a car that has all those extra parts to be maintained? It's only 20 miles each way, for crying out loud! If it was only 10 miles or so, I'd ride my freakin' bike to work and get rid of some of this flab...

Then I thought, "Hey, what about an electric car?"

For me, and probably a few tens of millions other must-drive commuters, that would be fantastic! Just think: plug the sucker in overnight to charge up, taking advantage of the reduced electric rates (we're on a tiered meter system, and electricity's cheaper at night). My car would only need a range of around 50 to 60 miles (with the range taking into account lower battery performance in the winter). Other folks might need a car with longer legs, but a solid 50 miles would be fine for me.

I also don't need a speed demon: let's face it, with traffic congestion these days, how often do you really get a chance to speed at 80 mph during your commute? Sometimes, yeah, but if my electric econo-box can cruise at 60, with maybe a top speed of 75, and accelerate from 0 to 60 in maybe 8 or 10 seconds, I'm good. After all, I'm just going to work!

How about maintenance? Let's see, how many parts are in my Solara's V6 engine? I'm no mechanic, but I know that there are a LOT. The vast majority of the car's moving parts are under the hood, and I'm reminded of that fact every time I get the bill for the Solara's scheduled maintenance. It isn't cheap to maintain a car: According to AAA, the average annual maintenance cost of a car now is $735. Ouch.

The Tesla: Electric Can Be Cool and Fast!

How about the electricity needed to charge your shiny new electric car? Well, some folks say that if we plug our car into the ol' electric socket, we're just transferring the polluting from the tailpipe to our friendly neighborhood mercury-spewing coal-fired power plant. There may be a measure of truth in that, but let's think for a moment: during the day, when the electric grid is operating at peak loads, most of the electric vehicles are going to be out running around on the roads and not plugged in. At night, when the load on the electric grid normally goes way down, there's excess capacity just sitting there that the cars can slurp down.

Also, we don't need that old steenkeeng coal fired power plant to juice up our electric cars: you can recharge your car from solar cells, a small wind turbine (not mounted on the car, please - that doesn't work!), or even micro-hydro, depending on where you live. 

See, once you remove the fossile fuels from the vehicle power equation, you start opening up a lot of other possibilities in terms of renewable and sustainable sources of electricity to power commuter vehicles. Coal? Oil? Natural gas? Nuclear? Hydrogen? I scoff in your general direction! We can power our cars from solar, wind, wave power - all sustainable and renewable sources that are available TODAY.

What about the cost per mile? Well, a lot of folks have put together comparisons, but one that I think illustrates the costs the best is from the Advanced Vehicle Testing Activity of the Idaho National Laboratory. Their comparative cost per mile chart tells me that if my electricity cost is $0.12 per kWh and my vehicle has an electrical efficiency - basically mileage - of 3 miles per kWh, my cost per mile is $0.04 per mile!

By comparison, my Solara gets 26 miles to the gallon, so on this chart I'm probably running somewhere around $0.08 per mile with a gas price of $2.30 per gallon: twice as much as my hypothetical electric car at the current price we're paying for electricity! And as gas costs go up, obviously your cost per mile is going to go up, too. And at the lower electric rates that we had last year before our utility tripled our rates, I would've only been paying about a penny per mile!

I did a little theoretical cost comparison between what I have to pay for commuting in the Solara and what I might pay if I was driving an electric car that gets 3 miles per kWh. I'm not going to bore you with all the math here, but on paper it looks like I'd save right around $500 per year, and I was trying to keep things pretty conservative. That's not chump change, my friend!

So what's the downside to electric vehicles? The main bone of contention is the range: most EVs have a range of somewhere around 50 to 100 miles, depending on the type and capacity of your batteries, terrain, how fast you're driving, etc. But for Mr. John Q. Commuter, what's the big deal? A solid 50 miles at 60 miles an hour would certainly work for me! And heck, depending on where you work and what your company's policies are, you might be able to plug your car in to charge while you're slaving away, so you'll have plenty of juice to get home. Some countries in Europe (where they apparently have at least some electric vehicles) that are just a TAD more far-sighted than we are even have stations where you can plug in your EV to charge up. For Free. Hmmm.

But now we come to the true downside: how many electric vehicles have you seen on dealer showroom floors lately? Zippo! I'm not a conspiracy theory buff, but I find it very odd that the major car manufacturers have made little more than a paltry effort to get pure EVs on the market. This may come as a surprise - it did to me! - but GM, Ford, Chrysler, Nissan, Toyota, and Honda have all produced limited numbers of pure electric vehicles. I'd never heard of any of them, but Lord knows we certainly see enough ads for the gas-slurping Hummer!

But - and this is where I have to shake my head in wonder - almost all of these vehicles were offered under lease-only programs (except for the Toyota RAV-4 EV, which could be purchased), had almost no marketing, and many of them have been or will be destroyed once the leases are up.

GM's EV-1: Victim of Corporate Insanity?

Unfortunately, right now there are only few production electric cars out there. At the top end, and clear proof that electric can be sexy as hell, is the Tesla sportster. The Tesla totally rocks, but I'd have to pick up another couple of jobs to afford one: with all the extra goodies (including the flippin' floor mats!), it tops out at just over $100,000. I actually did ask my wife if I could have one for Christmas, but she just laughed. Go figure.

Another company offering some electric cars is ZAP!! They have two cars that are worthy commuter-mobiles, as well as a couple of others that would do well as Urban Electric Vehicles, which I'm going to save for another time. But their two zippy offerings are the Obvio ! 828E and Obvio ! 012E. Their performance is generally similar, and very impressive: a range of over 200 miles, a top speed of 120 mph, and acceleration of 0 to 60 in 4.5 seconds. The only downside is the price: the 828E has an estimated price of $49,000, while the sportier 012E comes in at $59,000. These cars are cool, but if I'm going to pay that much I'll just eat more peanut butter sandwiches and shoot for the Tesla!

But you can see the immediate problem with these cars: it's going to be hard for them to compete pricewise with the gas guzzlers, and there just aren't many other options since the big automakers have pulled the plug on most of their projects, with the notable exception of the Chevy Volt concept car. It has a lot of intriguing features, although the thing is, in my opinion, butt-ugly. Whew.

So where does that leave us wanna-be electric commuters? Again, why not just embrace the halfway solution and get a hybrid? Because I simply don't need a commuter vehicle that burns fuel. Gas prices are going to keep going up (if you don't believe that, please read up on China's projected oil consumption in Plan B 2.0), and I'd really like for the United States to get out from under all the problems attached to gasoline.

Hybrids are a great step forward, don't get me wrong! If you need a car now, for God's sake consider a hybrid ahead of a regular gas guzzler. But for most of us, hybrids really aren't the right tool for the job. Even if the fuel is ethanol, producing ethanol takes a lot of heat, which in U.S. ethanol plants usually is from natural gas. So, yeah, we burn a bunch of natural gas to make fuel that we then burn in our cars - now does that make sense? Not to me. Some folks who consistently need to travel long distances would do well with a flex-fuel hybrid, and I'd certainly love to have a flex-fuel hybrid family van, but I'll wager that most commuters would rather have an electric car if they knew how cost effective they can be. And again, that's just icing on the cake with all the other environmental benefits they could bring.

That leaves us with conversions of regular cars to EVs, unless you can get ahold of one of the rare production cars that's escaped the corporate guillotine. There are a few companies out there that do conversions of regular cars to electrics: normally they're smaller cars like the VW Rabbit, small pickups, Porsche sports cars, etc. The cost of a conversion runs from around $6,000 on up, plus the cost of the vehicle you're converting, plus labor. There are a few kits available, but not many. There are also quite a few EV-ers out there who can help newbies along, but it's a far cry from the way things should be. And it's not necessarily a cheap process.

My personal favorite is the eSpyder by Mendomotive: it's a full electric replica of the Porsche 550 Spyder and is almost as boss as the Tesla. They claim it has a range of 100 miles,  top speed of 115 mph, and can go from 0 to 60 in 9 seconds - at a cost of $32,000. I asked my wife if I could have an eSpyder for Christmas, since she wasn't going to cough up the Tesla. She didn't laugh quite as loud. I'm taking this as a good sign!

The main downside for conversions, though, is the batteries: lead acid batteries are the only ones that are affordable for the Average Joe and Josephine, and run from $1,000 on up for a set to power a car. Unfortunately, lead acid batteries normally only last from three to six years (although I've read reports of them lasting longer). More advanced batteries like NiMH are ten to fifteen times as expensive, alhough they'll last ten years or more. These and Lithium Ion batteries - which are really expensive! - are really only practical for car manufacturers who can take advantage of large economies of scale.

However, even given those limitations, an electric conversion is certainly worth looking at from the cost perspective. The hard part is just finding (or making) one!

So, here's what I want, auto makers, so listen up! Build me a full electric car with a 100 mile range, a cruising speed of 60 miles per hour and surge speed of 80, a 40,000 mile warranty (including the batteries), and an MSRP that's somewhere between $20,000 and $30,000, give or take a few grand. Ideally I'd like it to seat four, but I'll settle for two. Oh, and I'd really like a convertible model, if you wouldn't mind, and I'll happily pay a few extra grand for one. I can't stand driving hard-top cars.

If you guys build it, I'll buy it.

For links to related electric car sites, click here.

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	24-11-2007 19:53
	Check the Mendomotive site, I believe he has stopped converting 550 spyders (unfortunately) I got no response from email or phone messages. So I bought a Beck through Open Road Motors (also known as Green Rides) at 408-871-0500 (Campbell, CA). They have teamed up with Mike Brown of ElectroAutomotive in Felton, CA, to convert Beck Spyders to EV's. Prototype is under way, mine will start in early Jan '08. Looks like a great car to me, especially after it plugs into my roof! Report

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