| Why Wait For Detroit? Drive a Converted Electric Vehicle Today |
| Bottlenecks and You 1. Have you read Batson's Nightmares? 2. There are two anticipated bottlenecks that could restrict the number of EVs put on the road over the next five years. a) number of converters b) capital for securing vehicles that are ready to be converted There are plenty of batteries, motors, and other components. The limiting factors that block putting 1 million EVs on the road over the next five years are related to you and me. Can you identify at least one person in your community who could become a reliable converter and who could adhere to the standards of a national chain of converters? Can you find $1,000 to lend to a "pool of candidates for conversion"? Suppose that person in your community decides to become an EV converter. Are you willing to help start a pool of capital to get that converter some cars that can be displayed, ready for conversion? Consider the time needed to evaluate a vehicle. Then a client decides not to go ahead with the project. The vehicle is rejected and sold for scrap or for parts. The converter has lost time spent in evaluating that vehicle. Consider a situation where the converter has an extra $10,000 to spend on buying five to ten useful vehicles, to keep these cars "on the lot" for the spur of the moment buying decision. Many clients are likely to say, "Sure, you've taken me for a ride in your EV. I'd like a (bigger) (smaller) vehicle. Do you have anything to show me?" Bingo! On the lot, five choices. If you are interested, consider making a "Rocky Mountain Offer" to a converter near you. Rocky Mountain Institute put the word out to its supporters that RMI had a choice: borrow money at market rate and take longer to pay off the innovations, or borrow from people who support sustainable development. Within six months, RMI had the financing it needed to expand its center. So, are you and I willing to help converters in your area get started? The agreement might be "You can pay me back after you sell the first car." For more information about this idea, write to me s2314@tmail.com Steve McCrea |
WWFD Commendation to Charlie Garlow and David Goldstein for sustaining an EVA (association) for more than fifteen years. Bravo! Their efforts have led to a more-informed public. |
| Recommended Converters Ampmobile Conversions LLC P.O. Box 5106 Lake Wylie, S.C. 29710 1-866-831-1082 (message) 1-704-591-8076 Email: info@ampmobiles.com www.AmpmobileConversions.com Note from the webmaster: I hope that more people like Mike Moore (Ampmobile Conversions of Lake Wylie, SC, the guy who converted a car for me) will get trained in the specifics of how to make a reliable, safe, and professionally converted EV. ElectroAuto.com trains mechanics in how to install the VoltsRabbit (TM) kit and future kits that ElectroAuto develops. Contact Shari Prange and Mike Brown to find out who in your area has been trained to install the VolkRabbit(TM). |
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| A ground-up, purpose built EV from FIAT. |
| Clearing the Smoke......
Of Electric Vehicle Myths Shari Prange ©2001 Shari Prange Page 98 Home Power #84 • August / September 2001 The relative handful of electric vehicles (EVs) on the roads today are surrounded by a cloud of smog produced by the vast majority of cars, which still burn petroleum products for fuel. But the EVs are obscured by another kind of cloud as well. It is a cloud of myths and misinformation that permeates the public consciousness. Some of this has been deliberately spread by, shall we say, dark anti-EV forces... But most of it is simply the result of honest but faulty assumptions. Some of the misconceptions make EVs look bad, and some make them look too good. Let’s examine the most common myths and misconceptions about EVs, and compare them to the real facts. Myth #1: An EV’s Range is Too Short When asked how long a man’s legs should be, Abraham Lincoln replied, “Long enough to reach the ground.” How long is a long enough range for an EV? That depends on what you need to do with it. Ninety percent of the cars in the United States travel fewer than 25 miles (40 km) a day. A typical home-built electric conversion can get 50 miles (80 km) or more on a charge. Some can get quite a bit more. Even a very modest, low-performance conversion will get 20 to 25 miles (32 to 40 km). Range is a function of chassis weight and aerodynamics, battery pack size, road conditions and terrain, traffic flow, and driving style. You need to examine your real life driving patterns, and then see whether one type of EV or another has long enough “legs” to do the job for you. “Well, sure, most of the time I just drive to work and back. But what about when I want to go on vacation?” Again, statistics show that most households have more than one vehicle. Does yours? Many people have a small economical car for daily local use, and a bigger vehicle for long trips. The small one could be electric. An electric car is like a microwave oven. It can’t replace all the functions of a conventional oven. But there are some things that it does much better than the traditional oven, and it does some things the old oven can’t do at all. Despite its “limitations,” most households have one, and use it a lot. Myth #2: EVs Are Slow When people think of EVs, they think of golf carts, or some tiny funny looking little thing that their eccentric old neighbor drove in the 1970s. They think 25 or 35 mph (40 to 55 kph) is the best it can do. This is absolutely not true. Even a very basic conversion can do 55 to 65 mph (88 to 104 kph), and some can do more than 90 mph (145 kph). These are normal street cars, not tricked out race cars. Like range, speed will be related to the chassis weight and shape, battery pack size, and terrain. “Yeah, but how long does it take to get up to that speed?” To paraphrase an old racing saying, “Speed costs amps. How fast do you want to go?” Depending on how the car is designed, it can come close to, or even exceed acceleration for a normal gas car. Acceleration is determined by (again) chassis weight and battery pack size, as well as battery type and controller type. Do you simply want to be able to merge safely onto the freeway? Or do you have some unresolved emotional issues that require leaving smoking patches of rubber at the stoplight? There is a very active organization of electric drag racers who will be delighted to demonstrate this for you. The choice is yours. Myth #3: If I Run Out of Juice, I’m Stuck First of all, your car will (or, at least, it should) have some kind of gauge to let you know how much charge you have left. This may be a voltmeter, a watt-hour meter, or just a plain old state-of-charge gauge that reads from “Full” to “Empty,” just like a gas gauge. This does not have to be rocket science. Second, you need to know that an EV does not just stop dead like a gas car does when it runs out of gas. As you get very low on charge, you will notice a slight sluggishness, especially on hills. This will gradually increase over the course of several miles. If you have miscalculated badly enough, you will eventually need to pull over to the side of the road. Unlike the driver of a gas car out of juice, however, you do not need to get out your cell phone and call AAA, or start hitchhiking. Instead, you simply let the car rest for a few minutes. You can watch the needle of your stateof- charge gauge rise as the batteries recover a portion of their charge. You can now drive a little farther. If necessary, you can repeat this process several times to get home, although it’s not recommended to make a habit of it. Myth #4: EVs Just Move the Pollution Source This is a very prevalent myth. People will give you that “Gotcha!” knowing smirk and say, “Of course, EVs just transfer the pollution from the tailpipe to the power plant.” Again—not true. This particular myth has multiple fallacies in it, so let’s take it apart piece by piece. Let’s say you have a gas car and an electric car sitting side by side at the stoplight. The electric car is cleaner than the gas car, even if you include the pollution from the power plant—even if it’s a nasty coal burning plant. That’s because it’s much easier to control pollution from one large stationary smokestack (where it’s possible to install giant scrubbing equipment) than it is to control a million tiny mobile tailpipes. Power plants are constantly monitored and get regular maintenance. Far too many cars are only checked every year or two when the law requires it, and only get maintenance or repairs when something makes noise or falls off. But is it really fair to compare power plant emissions for the EV to tailpipe emissions for the gas car? What about pollution caused by the oil refinery, and the tanker ships and trucks? (This is the part where the smirk melts into sheepish realization.) In a full (oil) well-towheel comparison, the EV comes out even further ahead. Myth #5: Electric Power Is Less Efficient A similar myth is that EVs are less efficient in their use of energy, because there are substantial losses in the power transmission lines. Well, yes, there are. But there are even greater losses in the running of an internal combustion engine. A gas engine needs a radiator to carry off the excess heat; otherwise the engine will destroy itself. All that heat represents wasted energy. Again, if you look at a full well-to-wheel comparison, almost 50 percent more energy makes it to the wheels of the EV than to the wheels of the gas car. Myths #6 to #8: In An Accident, An EV Will... People are afraid of things that are unusual, or that they don’t understand. EVs fit both criteria. People are afraid that, in an accident, an EV will explode, or electrocute them, or melt them like the Wicked Witch of the West in a pool of battery acid. In fact, some people are afraid to drive them in the rain, or to wash them, for fear of getting electrocuted. When gas cars first came out, there were similar sentiments. Where we live in Santa Cruz, there is an early American dairy ranch that has been restored and opened as a historical park. The tour guide explains that the garage is situated way over there because the lady of the house was skeptical of this new-fangled automobile. She wanted it kept far from the house so that if it blew up in the middle of the night, it wouldn’t burn the house down. Sound silly? Well, maybe a little. But do you realize that a single gallon of gasoline has the explosive power of twenty-two sticks of dynamite? Yet people routinely strap their infants into these contraptions and drive around at high speeds with a tank full of ten or twenty gallons of this stuff, often mere inches away from all those scalding hot engine and exhaust parts. My point here is not to slam gas cars, but to point out a dangers of something new and strange. At the same time, we conveniently forget that familiar items we use without a second thought every day have comparable dangers. If we are going to compare technologies fairly, we have to try to look at them both from a similar perspective. So let’s look at these fears one at a time. Electrocute Me To get a shock, you have to come into contact with an electrical circuit. A normal car uses the metal chassis as the ground portion of the electrical circuit. An electric car’s battery pack does not. It is a “floating,” or isolated system. In fact, various components on the car have built-in ground fault detectors, so that they will not operate if there is battery pack current passing through the chassis, even in milliamps. The only place to contact the circuit is directly at the batteries or components under the hood, or at the cable ends. These cables do not normally enter the passenger compartment, or if they do, it is only minimally to accommodate a circuit breaker. If your car is damaged badly enough to have bare cables somehow protruding into the cabin, the circuit is probably destroyed in numerous places, and you’ve got much bigger problems to worry about. And remember that circuit breaker we just mentioned? That’s one safety device that will trip automatically under high current, or can be flipped manually to break the circuit. There should also be fusible links, which will blow automatically in case of a short, and break the circuit. Car washes, rain, and normal road splash are not hazards, and will not cause you to get shocked. Explode In the movies, all cars in accidents explode. In real life, it seldom happens. There is nothing inherently explosive about an electric car in normal use. The one danger comes from hydrogen gas, which is given off by the batteries under severe abuse or during charging. Hydrogen is lighter than air, and if the battery area is properly ventilated, it will quickly rise and dissipate. A pretty strong concentration of hydrogen is needed before it reaches explosive levels. The most common situation for a battery explosion is not in an EV at all, but in an old VW Beetle. The battery compartment was out of sight and completely enclosed—a perfect recipe for neglected maintenance and an accumulation of gas. It was also located right under the rear seat. You lean into the back seat to retrieve a package, put your knee on the seat, the springs contact the battery posts and make a short circuit, and ka-pow! This resulted from poor design, not from inherent danger in using batteries. Sensible EV design overcomes the risks, and eliminates the chance of explosions. Burn Me With Acid The acid in a battery is not like the stuff in the movie “Alien,” that instantly ate through everything in its path. In fact, it is not uncommon for people working on their cars to splash themselves with battery acid and not even notice. They don’t realize it until the next time they launder their blue jeans, and the weakened cotton fibers melt away, leaving a series of holes. The jeans have holes in them, but not the person. If you know you’ve been in contact with battery acid, of course it’s a good idea to wash it off as soon as possible, but you might not even feel it. It takes some time before it starts to irritate the skin. In fact, gasoline splashed on your skin and not washed off can lead to some pretty nasty skin irritation. In gas cars, the battery is often in the left front corner of the car—the place most likely to be contacted in a collision—and minimally secured. Yet we have spoken to numerous firefighters, paramedics, and tow truck drivers who are intimately involved with accidents on a daily basis. Battery acid spills are not a significant hazard at accident scenes. Sure, an EV has a lot more acid on board. But it is carried in lots of small cells. You would have to break a lot of cells open to get any significant amount of acid spilled. In a full wheel-to-wheel comparison, EVs are more efficient and less polluting than internal combustion cars. We had a graphic demonstration of this about eight years ago. Our electric kit car is a fiberglass body on a VW chassis. In other words, a little more protection than tissue paper. It was hit by an older American Buick that nailed it dead on the battery pack, right behind the driver. The impact pushed the EV sideways across an intersection, over the curb, and into a signpost. No one was hurt. The Buick scraped its bumper a little. The kit car body was shattered. Three wheels were bent. One battery box cracked because the frame rail supporting it broke and dropped the box on the ground. Another box split at the seams. Not a drop of acid was spilled. In another accident, an electric Rabbit belonging to a customer was hit by a Suzuki, right in the middle of the VW grill. The impact was also right in the middle of the front batteries, which were resting in racks only, not enclosed in boxes. The Rabbit lost the acid from one cell of one battery. The Suzuki, on the other hand, split its oil pan and dropped all its oil on the road. There’s actually a safety advantage to all those batteries. In the early days of crash testing gas cars, testing was sometimes done with the batteries drained, because people were concerned about acid spills. Then it was noticed that the cars with full batteries did better in the crash tests. The liquid absorbs some of the impact, just like those water-filled barrels along the highways. If the liquid in a single battery made a noticeable difference in a gas car crash, think about the impact absorption of six or eight batteries under the hood. In fact, there have been a few instances of racing EVs crashing straight into a cement wall at highway speeds. There have been no explosions, fires, electrocutions, acid burns, or even injuries to the drivers. Myth #9: Dead Batteries Will Pollute Landfills When you buy a new battery for your car, the seller will want the old “core” in return, and will charge you a fee if you don’t give it to him. For a whole pack of EV batteries, this can really add up, so it makes sense to turn the cores in. They are then deconstructed, and the components are recycled into new batteries. In fact, lead-acid batteries are one of the most highly recycled items in the country, with a rate of 99 percent. Magic Carpet Myths Here’s where the myths turn in the opposite direction. Instead of making EVs into monsters, these myths try to turn them into magic carpets. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a free lunch, or perpetual motion. People think they can get free energy and unlimited range if they only attach the right device to an EV. So let’s look at a few of these pipe dreams. Myth #10: Solar Panel Probably the most popular of these is the solar-panelon- the-roof. However, PV efficiencies are so low that even with a PV-covered roof, the average EV sitting in full sun all day long would only gain about 5 miles (8 km) worth of electricity. Now, if you drive less than five miles a day and you live in Arizona, or if you drive 15 miles (24 km), but you only do it twice a week, this might work for you. For most people, it would not be enough to justify the cost of the panels. Solar charging is generally only practical from a large stationary array. Myth #11: Generator The other top contender is the Honda-generator-in-theback- seat. Briefly, generators are noisy, they vibrate, and they re-introduce the fuel and maintenance issues of internal combustion vehicles. They also can produce as much pollution as thirty gas cars. For all of that, they will probably only produce enough energy to get you an extra ten miles (16 km) of range. An EV, simply cruising, will draw 20 KW of power. That’s DC power. Most generators are rated for AC output. Converting that to DC reduces it considerably. The math just is not favorable. Myth #12: Windmill for power Then there’s the ever-popular windmill-on-the-roof. Or on the axle—doesn’t matter where. A similar scheme is the alternator hooked to the axle or motor shaft. The problem for both of these is the same. The energy they capture is not really “free.” It has to come from somewhere, and where it comes from is the car’s momentum. In other words, the harder you try to turn a windmill or an alternator to charge the batteries, the more you slow down the car. If you’ve ever ridden a bicycle with a generator headlight, you know how much harder it is to pedal with the drag of the generator on. If you want to try a wind experiment, mount a small fan on top of your bicycle helmet and go for a ride. See what the wind resistance does to your energy level and speed. Not to mention what the sight does to your reputation in the neighborhood. Just the Facts When the smoke finally clears, you can see that EVs are not a magic free ride, but neither are they the crippled, dangerous frauds that they are often portrayed to be. Most misinformation is a result of starting from assumptions instead of checking actual numbers, or not making apples-to-apples comparisons. An electric vehicle does one kind of driving particularly well. This happens to be the same kind of driving that most cars spend most of their time doing. When they are fitted to the proper use, EVs are very reliable, practical, and clean. Once you get past the myths and misconceptions, it’s as clear as day. Access Shari Prange, Electro Automotive, PO Box 1113-HP, Felton, CA 95018 • 831-429-1989 • Fax: 831-429-1907 shari.prange@homepower.com www.electroauto.com Electric Auto Association, PO Box 6661, Concord, CA 94524 • 510-814-1864 • www.eaaev.org California Energy Commission, 1516 Ninth Street, MS-29, Sacramento, CA 95814 • 916-654-4287 www.consumerenergycenter.org/transportation/afv/ev.html National Electric Drag Racing Association, 2430 S.W. Scenic Drive, Portland, OR 97225 information@nedra.com • www.nedra.com Australian Electric Vehicle Association, PO Box 520, St Ives, New South Wales, 2075 Australia • 0500-552-550 www.aeva.asn.au The UK Electric Car Association, Blue Lias House, Station Road, Hatch Beauchamp, Somerset, TA3 6SQ UK • 01823 480196 • Fax 01823 481116 webmaster@electric-cars.org.uk www.electric-cars.org.uk Vancouver Electric Vehicle Association, P.O Box 3456, 349 W. Georgia St., Vancouver British Columbia, Canada, V6B 3Y4 • 604-878-9500 • info@Veva.bc.ca www.veva.bc.ca |