Alternate Power Sources Nearing Road Reality : Officials Take a Look at Gas-Free Cars
Out of a $200 wrecked Volkswagen, Kenneth Krutz has built his dream machine: a sleek, three-wheel, open-cockpit electric car that will reach 70 m.p.h. with a full set of batteries.
The dashboard is lined with solar cells. If the weather, namely the wind, is right, he can turn to a propeller--another source of free power.
“It’ll store energy just sitting in the parking lot,” Krutz said Thursday, showing off the low, cone-shaped “Solar Wind” for officials at the South Coast Air Quality Management District in El Monte. “I spent about 5 1/2 years developing this. It was an exercise in efficiency.”
The vehicle was just one of several electric cars and relatively clean-burning methanol, ethanol, propane, natural gas and hydrogen-powered vehicles on display as air-quality officials and the state Senate transportation subcommittee met to look at the future of non-gasoline-powered cars in Southern California.
The meeting, at a time when Los Angeles cannot comply with federal air pollution control deadlines, gave a veritable green light to manufacturers and fuel suppliers to put yesterday’s automotive visions onto the road.
“We want to see a minimum--a minimum-- of 15% of the vehicles in this basin operating on clean-burning fuels by the turn of the century,” Jim Lents, executive officer of the AQMD, told reporters.
That would improve the air quality of the region by 5% to 10%, Lents estimated.
Mixture of Fuels
Legislators heard optimistic news from Los Angeles-area experts on a day when, coincidentally, the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee in Washington endorsed legislation encouraging manufacturers to produce more methanol-powered automobiles. That bill, co-authored by Sens. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.) and John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), would allow car makers to build more gas-inefficient luxury cars in return for manufacturing methanol cars.
One of the cars exhibited Thursday was a prototype Ford LTD Crown Victoria built to run on any combination of methanol, ethanol or gasoline--the kind of “flex vehicle” encouraged under the federal legislation. The AQMD sees such cars as a way to introduce drivers to methanol while service stations gear up to provide the cleaner-burning fuel, Lents said.
Methanol, now used in about 500 experimental Ford cars in California, provides as much or more horsepower as gasoline and costs about the same to use, he said.
“The technology’s there--they operate fine,” the AQMD official said. “It’s just a matter of creating the demand for them.”
The California Energy Commission took steps to put methanol into widespread use earlier this year, announcing an agreement with Atlantic Richfield Co. to begin marketing the fuel at five service stations in the Los Angeles Basin this year and 20 more in 1988. A similar agreement could be reached soon with Chevron, opening the door for perhaps 70 or more methanol stations statewide in the next few years, Lents said.
Experts expressed similar optimism about other kinds of cleaner running cars. In a few months, General Motors Corp. will make available its new GVan, a $20,000 electric van that will go 55 m.p.h. and have a range of 55 to 60 miles between recharges, said Michael Hertel, environmental affairs manager for Southern California Edison Co.
A forerunner of that van has been tested by Edison all over Los Angeles. Hertel said he found no trouble with the vehicle despite its relatively sluggish acceleration--zero to 30 m.p.h. in 11 seconds.
“That wasn’t a problem, actually,” he said. “In stop-and-go driving, you don’t notice any problem at all.”
And it’s quiet, he said: “You stop at an intersection and you expect to hear a hum--there’s nothing. At 55 all you hear is the wind noise. It’s a real strange experience.”
Electric vehicles may be particularly adaptable to Southern California because the fuel supply is cheap and readily available, Hertel told legislators. Homeowners with 220-volt wiring could recharge the vehicles overnight during non-peak electric hours. Up to a million or more of the vehicles could take to the road without any demand for new electric power plants.
Low Operating Costs
Fuel costs for the van are about half the operating expenses of a similar van running on gasoline, offsetting its relatively high initial cost, he said.
Years from now, cars also may run cheaply and cleanly on hydrogen gas, said developers of a turbo-charged, fuel-injected, hydrogen-powered pickup truck.
Robert Zweig, who drank from the exhaust pipe to show that clean water is a byproduct of the fuel, said today’s relatively high cost for hydrogen power will go down as demand for the fuel increases. Riverside is studying plans to use hydrogen-powered vehicles in its city fleet, he said, and may manufacture the fuel itself through inexpensive electrolysis.
“We think by next year we’re going to show economic practicality,” he said.
