He Got a Charge Out of Assignment
Learning to live with an electric vehicle isn’t difficult in Southern California, but it is not a seamless transition either.
Think of switching from carnivore to vegetarian: Suddenly you’ve got some cooking implements you’ll never use again, others that you need to rush out and buy. You have to change your shopping habits and hunt farther afield for goodies to make meals tasty.
Same is true with an electric car.
You don’t need to hunt for gas stations anymore, but you have to memorize the locations of charging stations, and the routes that best get you to them.
You have to be far more aware of mileage than ever before--and you have to plan even short trips with the precision of a general plotting a military maneuver.
Spontaneous trips to any point farther than half-a-charge away are out, and you’d better always know just how much of a charge your vehicle is carrying.
You also have to invest $800 to $1,800 in a 220-volt charger for your garage, and you’d best remember to plug in every night.
Once you have the charger, though, you always start out in the morning with the electric equivalent of a full tank, at an average cost of about $1 per fill-up at Southern California Edison Co.’s off-peak residential rate of 4.5-cents per kilowatt-hour.
You never have to go to the gas station (or worry about escalating gas prices), and you have few if any routine mechanical repairs or maintenance chores to worry about. Electric motors don’t need oil changes, timing chain adjustments, spark plugs or tuneups.
Regular maintenance consists mainly of having the electronics inspected and the special low-resistance EV tires (almost all tire companies make a line of them) rotated every 5,000 miles or so.
There also are a few operational quirks that make an EV different from an ICE-V (internal-combustion engine vehicle), but otherwise, there’s not a lot of strangeness involved.
Get used to transmissions with a single forward speed, to the electric hum that replaces a gasoline engine’s roar--and to the absolute and initially unnerving lack of any throttle response when you start up or when you jiggle the accelerator pedal while idling at a stoplight--and most EVs available today are almost indistinguishable from their ICE cousins. Most, in fact, are converted ICEs--only Honda Motor Co.’s EV-Plus and General Motors Corp.’s EV1 were built from the ground up to be electric vehicles.
I found that out as I spent four weeks humming around Orange County in a series of electric vehicles to see for myself just how hard--or simple--it would be.
I wasn’t an EV fan when I started, but I became one. I don’t use one now, because on my household budget I can’t afford the payments. But if I could, and if I needed to replace one of the two ICEs my wife and I use for daily transportation, I’d get an electric in a flash.
I’d do it for all the benefits listed above: for the environmental benefits of driving a car with no tailpipe and no tailpipe emissions and because California now allows single-occupant EVs (and other alternative-fuel vehicles) to use the diamond lanes. There’s also the pragmatic reason that electrics are the vehicles of the future, so we might as well start getting used to them.
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That’s not a particularly bold prediction, by the way.
The debate over the marketability of electrics today isn’t really about electric cars, it’s about the effectiveness of the present method of getting the electrical fuel on board.
Batteries, the principal commercial means today, have a lot of problems--foremost their high initial cost and the need to take the vehicle out of service frequently to recharge them. But figure out a way to generate electricity on board (that’s what the hydrogen fuel cell does), or to recharge a battery pack in five minutes instead of five hours, and a whole lot of the argument against EVs goes away.
I have another prediction, based on the fact that cars still sell on the basis of looks and performance: Once word gets out that a well-designed EV with its all-torque all-the-time motor can run circles around most conventional ICE-Vs, demand will go up.
(I offer as proof of that performance claim GM’s experiments with the EV1, rated at the electric motor equivalent of 137 horsepower and 110 foot-pounds of torque. The motor’s governor was disconnected and top speeds of 188 mph were achieved without additional modification. Dodge boasts of the V-10 Viper’s 450 horsepower and 490 foot-pounds of ground-shaking torque. But its top speed is just a hair faster, at 192 mph. Need more? How about the tZero electric sports car built by AC Propulsion in San Dimas? Its zero-to-60-mph acceleration time of 4.9 seconds will keep it wheel-to-wheel with a Corvette at the drag strip.
I didn’t drive the tZero, but I did log seat time in most of the electrics that were available to retail or fleet customers last year, as well as a quick trip in a preproduction version of the plastic-bodied, two-seat City car that Ford Motor Co.’s Southern California-based Think Group EV subsidiary will begin marketing in 2002.
Here are some thoughts on seven EVs, in the order I drove them:
Ford Ranger EV
I learned to drive an electric with this pickup, and amazed myself by running it so hard that I used up half a charge (and it only had half when it was delivered) on one 17-mile trip from the office to home. I live up a pretty steep hill, and by the time I got to the top, every one of the truck’s warning lights and buzzers was doing its thing and the motor had dropped down into its “creep home” mode that limits speed to a few miles an hour in order to conserve juice.
From that experience, I learned the first lesson an EV driver needs to know: The faster you go, the more aggressively you drive, the more hills you climb, the heavier the loads you carry, the faster you’ll consume electricity.
By the time I gave the Ranger back to Ford at the end of a week, though, I was averaging 50 miles per charge, which is about as good as it gets with that particular vehicle. For that reason, though Ford has made them available to the general public, it markets them mainly to commercial fleets--such as Southern California Edison’s--that can use short-haul, light-capacity pickups.
My notebook reflects my surprise that the electric Ranger seemed peppier than its four-cylinder gasoline-engine counterpart, and its cargo capacity was almost the same, at 1,200 pounds, as that of a regular Ranger.
Honda EV-Plus
This electric mini-minivan was built from scratch to be an electric vehicle, so it handled well and had none of the slightly off-balance feel of other converted ICE-Vs, like Nissan’s Altra, that perch a conventional body atop a custom-built chassis stuffed with batteries.
With its power doors and windows, in-dash CD, comfortable bucket seats and air conditioning (which uses a separate battery and can be turned on by remote control to cool the interior before you climb in--what a great idea!), the EV-Plus offers the comforts of a traditional vehicle.
It was among the quickest and nimblest of the EVs, though it was, like most, electronically limited. Top speed was about 85 mph, and it had lots of acceleration until it hit the 80-mph mark. Passing, on city streets and freeways, was always a breeze (and it is a kick to sneak up on unsuspecting pedestrians in parking lots with a silent-running EV, although good manners demand that you do let them know you are there by lightly tapping the horn).
I averaged about 80 miles per charge in the Honda, and probably could have done better (it is rated for 120 miles) if I hadn’t been so intent on seeing how quickly I could get to top speed.
Toyota RAV4 EV
The EV looks just like a regular RAV4 and runs about the same (although that probably isn’t the case with the more powerful new 2001 gasoline-powered RAV4 just introduced).
People who could tell this was an electric usually gave me a grin, a nod or a quick thumbs-up as I drove (silently) by, but because the thing looks like its conventional cousin, it didn’t garner a lot of looks.
This was my third EV, and I was becoming accustomed to jumping in, turning the key and hearing nothing but a click and a hum. I was more startled by the roar on the occasions that I started my wife’s gas-burning sedan than by the silence of the EVs.
It also is fun to watch the guys at the carwash try to figure out what’s up when they jump in and hit the gas when the RAV4 is in neutral and there is no noise.
I averaged about 75 miles per charge with the Toyota.
Terry O’Day, planning director at Budget EV Rentals, said the RAV4 is the most frequently rented of his Los Angeles International Airport-based fleet’s electric vehicles.
“It’s the most popular and so far seems to be the most reliable,” he said. “That’s probably because it is the closest to a conventional design and has the best passenger space and range.”
Nissan Altra EV
Other than the EV1 (see next entry), this electric drew the most notice and comment from other drivers. That’s because it is built on a Japanese-market Nissan body not available in the U.S.--not quite an SUV, not quite a station wagon, not quite a sedan, but a hybrid that would have beaten Lexus and BMW and all the other crossover makers to the punch had Nissan brought it over here as a gasoline-powered model.
The four-door Altra, outfitted with four bucket seats, had plenty of cargo and passenger room. It was, outside of the Chrysler EPIC, the most spacious of the EVs.
It also was among the heaviest and because of that was one of the poorest performers. It got us where we wanted to go, but did so with pretty anemic acceleration and a woefully inadequate top speed of 75 mph. We took the Altra on a 70-mile loop from Orange to Santa Ana to Laguna Beach and back to Orange one Sunday, and in doing so ran it from fully charged to virtually empty--we were in limp-along mode as we approached our driveway.
A fun fact with which to amuse your friends and neighbors: The Altra has a digital tachometer that tells you how fast the electric motor is spinning. And that’s a whole lot faster than the crankshaft of a gasoline-fueled car. Most conventional cars top out at about 6,200 revolutions per minute, and a few really high-tech models as well as most motorcycles will spin up to 10,000 rpm. But at 74 mph on the freeway, the Altra’s tachometer showed a staggering 16,000 rpm.
General Motors EV1
This little rocket by GM remains the gold standard of the EV set, a two-seat sports coupe with “Jetsons”-era styling and neck-snapping acceleration.
It handles like a true sports car, its low-slung batteries providing a low center of gravity that pins it to the road.
EV1 drivers are almost unanimous in their enthusiasm for the car, and after driving one for a week, I could easily see why.
I have to confess that I got lousy mileage the first few days because I kept chirping the front tires (it’s a front-wheel-drive machine) as I took off and I went just about everywhere with the accelerator pedal pegged to the floor.
But by the end of my week, I had several trips of 100-110 miles on a single charge, with a little bit of juice still available when I parked and plugged in for the night.
There’s limited storage on board, and the earliest versions were plagued with low range--drivers reported getting 50 to 60 miles per charge. The newest version, and perhaps the last, uses advanced batteries, and drivers regularly report trips of 140 miles between charges.
Like the Honda EV-Plus, the EV1 has an air-conditioning system that uses a separate battery and can be used to “precondition” (GM’s term) the interior.
Chrysler EPIC
I didn’t get a week in this electric minivan, which uses the short-wheelbase Chrysler Voyager or Dodge Caravan body. But on a short trip to lunch while visiting DaimlerChrysler’s headquarters in Auburn Hills, Mich., I found that it drives just like a minivan with a bit less low-end acceleration and a much lower top speed--80 mph--than a conventional gasoline version.
Other than the electric fuel consumption and range-of-travel gauges in the dashboard, the interior is the same. Seating capacity is five, there are power windows and door locks, power anti-lock brakes and power steering, dual air bags and air conditioning.
All EVs, except for Ford’s Ranger and early Honda EV-Plus models, now employ inductive charging, which uses an electromagnetic field to pass the current from the charger to the storage batteries. But while the EV1 and others use a flat paddle that slips into a charging slot on the vehicle, Chrysler’s EPIC (for Electric Powered Interurban Commuter) requires a special plug-in unit that looks a lot like a gas pump nozzle. It enables the van to be fast-charged, though, providing a complete recharging in three hours or so when a 440-volt station is available. Otherwise, it takes six to eight hours to recharge with a 220-volt system.
The big drawback, because of the weight of the batteries it carries, is that the EPIC’s cargo capacity is lower than that of a conventional Chrysler van: 925 pounds versus 1,400. And there’s no CD player.
Chrysler hasn’t made the EPIC available to the public but has placed a number of them with one of the shuttle companies serving Los Angeles International Airport and has several others in test fleets around California and Michigan.
Think City Car
This was another short-trip experience, from the Detroit offices of Ford Motor’s Think Group to a local restaurant and back. But the two-seater performed well on that jaunt.
I loved the plastic body with the color molded in (look, Ma, no dents, no rust, no chipped paint), found the seats comfortable and the handling quite acceptable for a tall car with short wheelbase.
There’s plenty of room in the rear for storage, accessible through a glass hatchback door, tons of leg- and headroom and a claimed range of 55 miles with a top speed of 65 mph.
Think Group hasn’t priced the City yet, but word is that it will be about $22,000 before any subsidies are applied. In California, existing subsidy programs could get the out-of-pocket cost down to $15,000 or so, which could make the Think City a viable commuter car for a lot of people.
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Times staff writer John O’Dell covers the auto industry for Highway 1 and the Business section. He can be reached at john.odell@latimes.com.
EVs in California
* In Part 1 of our report last week, John O’Dell examined the prospects for electric vehicles in the wake of regulators’ unanimous approval of new requirements for zero-emissions vehicles. You can find a reprint on our Web site, https://www.latimes.com/highway1.
