Electric Car Goes Back to the Future
Greg Hanssen’s electric car is in a repair shop in Cerritos. No, the darn thing didn’t break down or run out of juice; it simply had an unfortunate run-in with a deer on a trip to the Pacific Northwest.
Just goes to show you, if it’s not one thing it’s another.
And for Hanssen, the broken headlight is nothing compared to the dismay that, come March, he’ll surrender his EV1 to General Motors as the automotive giant backtracks from its experiment with electric cars.
Nobody said being a pioneer was easy.
“It seemed like a no-brainer to me at the time,” says Hanssen of his decision to lease an EV1 in 1997. “It’s definitely a futuristic car, and that’s one of the reasons I was attracted to it, because it really stood out as something different.”
I must confess the electric-car era has, so far, eluded me. If I’ve passed one on the road in the past five years, it’s news to me. Too bad, because I’d probably have given the driver a toot of the horn and a friendly wave.
Why? Because the world needs people like the 35-year-old Hanssen--people who get a sniff of the future (or think they do) long before the rest of us and dive headlong into it.
Hanssen, an electrical engineer who lives in Irvine, is one of those guys. Once he could afford the leasing price of around $400 a month, he popped for an EV1 on July 4, 1997. “I loved it from the start,” he says. “Just a few months after I got the car I was wondering what took me so long to jump in.”
What took him so long was the price (California incentives made the lease more affordable) and an initial fear that the car was too limiting because it could go only 60 miles before needing recharging.
“I remember going home [after he first saw an EV1 at a dealership] and mapping out on a Thomas Guide how far I could drive from home,” Hanssen says.
Over time, however, Hanssen came to learn where the recharging stations are (more than you think in Southern California) and, more to the point, how to change his driving habits to accommodate the car’s thirst for electrical charges.
It was a heady time, and Hanssen and other like-minded drivers in a group he joined felt the same--and not only because the cars went from 0 to 60 in seven seconds. “It was just fun to squeal around the parking lot in something not using any gasoline,” Hanssen says.
And fun to be in the vanguard while the rest of us puttered behind. Hanssen still talks gleefully about the first time he got behind the wheel and typed in a code instead of turning an ignition key. “The whole dashboard lights up. You feel like you’re in a spaceship. It’s really cool.”
I ask if he felt he was part of history. “Absolutely. We had T-shirts that said ‘Driving the Future.’ We were totally into this.”
As it turns out, the future isn’t here just yet. GM is recalling the EV1s and declaring the experiment a grand one, but a failed one.
“The market never really grew the way the industry thought it would,” says GM spokesman Donn Walker. “We believed genuinely there would eventually be a market for them ... but that never happened. It’s time for the industry to admit that electric vehicles really are not proving to be sustainable or viable or marketable, and it’s time to move on to the next technology.”
Hanssen thinks the industry is giving up too soon. Toyota still makes an electric vehicle, and he says that’ll replace his beloved EV1.
I feel like apologizing to Hanssen on behalf of all wimps who didn’t take the leap with him.
“We don’t knock you,” he says. “We had to make a leap of faith ourselves to try it.”
So he’s not demoralized? “Let’s just say,” he says, “I enjoy hitting my head against a brick wall and will continue to do so.”
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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.
