Gasless Carriage : Electric Vehicle Manufacturer Charging Into New Market
Milton L. Sneller doesn’t want to change the world. He would settle for changing just a small piece--like, say, mail trucks.
Sneller’s little company makes electric vehicles, has made them, in fact, for 40 years. Among its products are the diminutive carts you see lugging pallets around factories or being driven by college security guards.
Now, though, electric vehicles--EVs, for short--are trundling out of the plants and campuses and onto the streets. In 10 years, according to the California Air Resources Board, at least every 10th car on the road in California will be an EV--a huge market.
EVs don’t belch carbon monoxide or the other air pollutants that gasoline-powered cars emit, which makes them a blessing for smoggy Southern California. And they don’t use much energy. If you’re stuck in traffic in one, it doesn’t idle as a car does, burning up gas. In an EV, if you haven’t got the pedal to the metal, you’re not using any energy.
Sneller’s company, Taylor-Dunn, wants to get into the larger business of selling on-road EVs: It would like to persuade the Postal Service, for instance, to use electric trucks on mail routes.
But Taylor-Dunn also faces the huge obstacles that are typical for a small company trying to make its way into a new market.
R.D. Taylor Sr. built his first electric cart in 1951 to deliver feed and gather eggs on a big chicken farm in Anaheim. Other farmers asked him to make EVs for them, and in the late ‘50s the company dumped its chickens to concentrate on making carts.
In 1995, Taylor’s son-in-law, Fred A. Dunn, joined the business, and it became Taylor-Dunn.
Back then, companies bought electric carts because they needed vehicles that they could use indoors without stinking up their barns or warehouses with exhaust fumes. And electric carts were also fairly quiet--they didn’t disturb the farm animals.
Today, a bigger incentive in Southern California is fighting foul air, and a practical electric vehicle could be one of the most important solutions to cleaning up the atmosphere. That’s why the Air Resources Board requires that by 1998, 2% of the cars sold by the major auto companies in California be zero-emission vehicles such as EVs. That 2% would be 40,000 vehicles, and 10% by 2003 would be 200,000.
Fewer than 4,000 EVs travel California’s roads now. And there are two big obstacles to putting more on the highway: Most of these cars’ batteries can’t hold enough electricity for more than 120 miles of cruising, and there are no places comparable to gas stations where a driver can stop to recharge.
Because of those roadblocks to developing an EV that can go anywhere, solutions are probably going to be found eventually by the major car companies.
But some people think that there is a market right now.
“All our studies,” said Ken Kurani, a researcher at the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis, “proceed from the basic assumption that it’ll be two-car families that buy EVs first.”
Such families might use a conventional car to drive long distances but would use an EV to commute to work. The vehicle could be recharged in a locked garage every night.
Taylor-Dunn, meanwhile, is focusing on the truck market. Up to now, the company’s vehicles have stayed inside the factory or on campus because they are too slow for the streets. And if they could go fast enough, they would be unstable. So the company has come out with the Electruck. The full-size small truck is designed to go at city-street speeds, and it does--30 miles per hour.
The company says there’s no reason why an Electruck, with some modifications to meet auto safety standards, couldn’t deliver beer or bread or bananas across town. Even mail--anything that involves a fixed route with a limited distance--could be hauled in an EV.
Sneller, 48, was an electronics executive--as was Arthur J. Goodwin, who is chairman of Taylor-Dunn--when the pair decided that they wanted to buy and run their own company.
Sneller, who does the talking for the pair, says he and Goodwin gave their parent company the cocky name “World Class Management Inc.” They borrowed $9 million to buy Taylor-Dunn in October, 1990.
So far, the results are mixed.
Sales are up 20% from two years ago, Sneller said, despite the recession. In Southern California, its largest market, the company sells about 1,000 EVs a year. On the other hand, Sneller and Goodwin, 48, had hoped to be selling $40 million worth of EVs a year by now; they sell $25 million. They had expected to employ 300 people by now; they employ 200. They wanted to have 10 new products; they have one--the Electruck.
And the Electruck, which already cost them a quarter of a million dollars to develop, needs additional engineering and then crash-testing to ensure that it meets federal safety standards for operating on-road.
The company hasn’t had to worry about such regulations before. And meeting them will be costly--so much that Taylor-Dunn says it is trying to get a grant from the state to help out.
Even then, the company may spend its time and money only to find itself checkmated by giant competitors.
“Every one of the major American and Japanese car manufacturers has not only an electric car in development but some sort of light electric truck waiting in the wings, too,” said Allen J. Scott, who has studied the EV industry as director of UCLA’s Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. “The competition is likely to be fierce.”
What do you get when you plunk down $15,000 for an Electruck? It can carry 1,500 pounds, including the driver. It is bigger than anything that the company has built before: 5 feet wide, 13 feet long. And it costs less to operate than if it ran on gasoline.
The drawback: It can only go 50 miles before the battery must be recharged from an electrical outlet, and doing that takes 9 1/2 hours.
Parked out back of the factory is the Electruck prototype. It is an elemental, unadorned machine that sits lower on its wheels and looks a little like an old Model T truck, with its boxy passenger compartment and utter lack of streamlining.
But step on the metal accelerator, and the truck springs forward, the 20-horsepower motor’s controller whining. The engineers, Sneller says over the buzzing of the controller, have gotten the vehicle up to 50 miles an hour, fast enough for city streets.
The EV industry could employ as many as 55,000 people directly and indirectly in Southern California by the year 2000, according to estimates by CALSTART, a Burbank consortium of 40 public and private agencies. In less optimistic projections, the region becomes a major supplier of components for EVs to the big automakers. In the most optimistic scenario, the state persuades one or more major car makers to move its actual EV production here.
“It’s not impossible,” UCLA’s Scott said. “Southern California is going to be the earliest and the biggest market. It’s already got an early start in developing EV technology, in design, in political support and in public interest.”
Southern California Edison, for instance, one of the nation’s largest electric utilities, has 30 people working on the EV business. McDonald’s Corp. has approached Edison about putting quick-recharge outlets at its fast-food restaurants, where it would offer free recharges. The idea makes retailing sense: People who come inside fast-food restaurants typically spend more than those who use the drive-throughs.
“One of the problems is, people don’t know very much about EVs now,” said Diane Wittenberg, manager of electric transportation for the utility. “But the good thing is that, when they find out a little, it captures their imagination.
The big question confronting Taylor-Dunn is: Can it branch out, or is it stuck in the factories and on the campuses, a niche where it says it already has 60% of the market?
“Sure, by going into road vehicles we’re moving into areas we’re not as familiar with,” Sneller said. “But we have to ask, is there a demand for an on-road truck out there? I don’t see why not.”
