Electric Vehicle Owners And Advocates

Stephen Taylor and David Kennington of the EV Club of the South are avid Electric Vehicle supporters. Steve Oppenheimer speaks with the two of them about the evolution of electric vehicles and get a first hand look at some different makes and models of EV vehicles that they own.

Full Transcription:

Ben Lack: We’ve got a group of people here that are electric vehicle enthusiasts. We have Dave Kennington, Steven Taylor, and Steve Oppenheimer who’s a correspondent for the Daily Energy Report. And we’re going to be talking about electric vehicles today. So I think the first thing we’d like to do is to kind of have you guys tell us a little bit about why you got into an interest into electric vehicles and maybe start from there.

Steven Taylor: Well, I got interested in a electric vehicles because when I turned sixteen was just about the time of the oil embargo, the Arab oil embargo. And it just seemed like, boy,  we don’t want to be buying gasoline from these countries that don’t like us. So to me, getting into EV was a way to get ourselves away from that dependency on oil. I really didn’t care that much about environmental perspectives. You know, air and all that kind of stuff. It was a national security to me. That was the overriding consideration. So I didn’t actually get an EV until about ten years ago. What I did was I made a pledge to myself that every vehicle I bought had to get better gas mileage than the previous one. I started with a Dodge Dart Demon, so I have a V8 engine and all that kind of thing. It wasn’t all that efficient, but then I went to Chevrolet Citation, the first front-wheel drive cars. Then I had to learn to drive a five-speed because they weren’t making the cars any better. They weren’t getting any better gas mileage.

Finally, I ended up with a Honda Insight, with the hybrid which is in the garage over there.

Steve Oppenheimer: Can we just step over and take a look at the Insight?

Dave Kennington: Still to this day, the best gas mileage of any car ever made.

Stephen Taylor: Right. And it’s over ten years old now. I got to a point where I was stuck. I said I can’t get any better, but I’d like to get another car.

Steve Oppenheimer: Now is this an electric car?

Stephen Taylor: No. It’s a hybrid car. It still runs a hundred percent on gasoline. It just runs more efficiently.

Steve Oppenheimer: Well, don’t some of the new cars that are call hybrids, aren’t they electric?

Stephen Taylor: No, not yet. There are some like the Chevrolet Volt that should be coming out next year or maybe towards the end of this year that are supposed to be plug-in capable. But those aren’t out yet.

Steve Oppenheimer: So there’s a distinction between the first generation hybrid and the new generation hybrids that are coming out.

Stephen Taylor: Right, right. Exactly.

Dave Kennington: If you don’t see a plug on a car, it’s not electric.

Ben Lack: So tell me when you guy were kind of making the switch to EV technology. What types of education did you have to kind of go through in order to really understand what the difference was between an EV vehicle and normal petrol vehicles?

Stephen Taylor: Well, I really didn’t have a problem with that per se because I had a Prius, even though the hybrid can run kind of in stealth mode. That’s what they call it. So it could run in limited amount of distance than all electrics. I kind of had a feel for what electric was already like. I guess the transition was I had to figure out how to maintain my own vehicles because we were sort of out on our own. There weren’t any cars that were made by manufacturers that I could take it to a garage if anything happened and get it fixed. That was the main educational process because other than that the car runs pretty much the same as the regular gas-powered car. I mean, they have accelerator pedal, a brake. The only other thing is that the range was a little shorter. You couldn’t just to got a gas station. You had to plan your trip a little bit better. But other than that…

Steve Oppenheimer: Can you show us the engine on this inside? Is this engine different from a regular gas vehicle engine?

Stephen Taylor: The main advantage of the Honda Insight, believe it or not, is really hardly even the electric part of it. It’s that they made the vehicle extremely light, and they put a little tiny engine in it that can just barely pull the car. The electric motor acts a turbo charger in this car to just give it enough boost that you can actually drive the car normally. I’ve never even figure out exactly where the electric motor is in this car. Because it’s hidden somewhere down here. David may have a better idea.

Dave Kennington: It’s kind of where the fly wheel were the converter is on a regular car. It’s just a very thin pancake, electric motor sandwiched between the gas engine and the transmission.

Steve Oppenheimer: Actually making cars lighter is, again, entering into today’s strategy as far as increasing gas mileage with composites. Is it not?

Stephen Taylor: Oh, yes. This car is extremely light. It’s only…

Dave Kennington: Eighteen hundred pounds?

Stephen Taylor: I think eighteen hundred pounds or so. I mean, even a compact car is more like twenty-five hundred pounds. So this is extremely light.

Steve Oppenheimer: So, Stephen, which car comes next in your collection?

Stephen Taylor: Well, actually, the car that came next is not here. It’s my little sparrow three-wheeler. It had lead-acid batteries would only go about twenty miles on a charger. And I had it up in Ohio, putting lithium batteries in it, so it would go more like eighty now. But it’s not here. They would actually coming today, but the batteries come from China unfortunately. I wish they made it in the U.S., but almost all lithium batteries are made in China at this point.

Ben Lack: What’s the big difference between the lithium batteries and normal acid batteries?

Stephen Taylor: It’s a whole big, huge stack because actually you start with lead-acid but then you went to NiCad batteries. Then you went to nickel metal hydride. Then you to lithium. The auto industries and the gas industries kind of kept us from…

Dave Kennington: Three generations of technology ahead.

Stephen Taylor: Yeah. But nickel metal hydride which is what’s in that RAV4 outside, that generation of battery was kind of held back by the oil companies.

Steve Oppenheimer: Dave, what does it mean in terms of three generations of battery technology in terms of weight, performance, durability? What’s the goal?

Dave Kennington: I can tell you I done some Prius plug-in hybrid conversions. I can tell you from that standpoint a lead conversion in a Prius has about an eight-mile all electric range. And a lithium conversion that has, it actually weighs a little bit less than the lead has about a forty-five mile range. So it’s over five times the energy density.

Ben Lack: How did you get interested in EVs?

Dave Kennington: It’s actually a long story. I started, again, back in the seventies. Like Stephen, it became obvious to me that petroleum was a limited natural resource. Basically, I was burning my grandchildren’s oil. I wanted to find some other way to live my life and get around. At the time, if you read Popular Science or Popular Mechanics, these magazines, they were talking about the new electric cars and hybrids that were coming kind of the same that it is now. I looked at that, and I wanted that. But there was nothing available. Like Stephen says to this day, you can’t really go to a car dealer and buy an electric car.

It looks like that’s going to change this next year. Chevy’s coming out with the Volt, and Nissan’s coming out with the Leaf which is an all-electric car, not even a plug-in hybrid. I’ve reserved one. I’m looking forward to that. Ever since then, I’ve been looking for an opportunity to buy an electric car. In the nineties, GM built a great electric car called the ED-1 in very limited numbers.

Steve Oppenheimer: What happened to that? We don’t see that on the road today.

Dave Kennington: Well, they’re all gone. My plan, what I was hoping to do, at the time, the cars were only leased, not sold. And I assumed when the leases ran out like any other car they leased that the cars would be sold as used, and I would just buy a used one. But that didn’t happen. When the leases ran out, GM took all the cars back and crushed them. Out of the thousand or eleven hundred cars, I think there’s about eighteen left, and they’re all in museums somewhere. They’re contention was they didn’t want the liability issues. I personally with many other enthusiasts offered to sign releases. They just didn’t agree to it.

Ben Lack: So part of what you do now, having gone through that whole experience, is try to advocate to other people that are driving cars that don’t run off electricity to consider making the switch from…

Dave Kennington: At this point, I think advocacy is our best strategy. All these electric cars like Stephen’s converted Yaris, his RAV4, they’re onesie, twosies. There’s a few hundred of them at the most. It’s not really going to move the needle on all our issues, energy efficiency, environmental concerns, dependency on foreign resources. Hey, you know, my wife has asthma. I hate dumping stuff in the air that makes her wheeze. There’s so many reasons to do this. And it’s been really so difficult to get people to pay attention. People just, gas got cheap in the eighties, and people went back to sleep. It’s pretty much what happened.

Steve Oppenheimer: So, Steve, we understand you’re operating your battery technology on your sparrow. What’s the next car in your collection that we could see today?

Stephen Taylor: This is a Duran electric car. Rick Duran developed this back in the late eighties. This was kind of a second surge of electric cars, and he was trying to a major manufacturer to decide to build these cars. It’s a three-wheeler, two-seater. Part of the reasons for doing three wheels at this point is you don’t have to pass all the government crash test and all that kind of stuff. It’s still considered a motorcycle.

Now, unfortunately, back in the eighties again, there wasn’t any interest. So he built two or three of these cars and that was it. After he drove it for a few years, it went into the Peterson Museum in L.A. and sat there for about a dozen years of so. And I bought on Ebay.

Steve Oppenheimer: I’m noticing this looks much, much different under the hood. Now this doesn’t look like the engine underneath my cars.

Stephen Taylor: Essentially what you’re seeing is almost all battery pack. The battery pack is all this green stuff up front. And I’ve got little battery balancers and little voltage detectors and all that kind of stuff all wired in here. This is a personal project and that’s why the wiring look so bad. If an OEM did it, then it would be all nice and neat.

Steve Oppenheimer: Are these lead-acid batteries like I have in my automobile right now?

Stephen Taylor: They’re similar. These are deep-cycle silicone lead-acid batteries.

Steve Oppenheimer: So they’re an improvement on that original technology?

Dave Kennington: Maybe one-point-five.

Stephen Taylor: A little bit. They’re designed to be deep-cycled down as opposed to a battery in a car is designed for power. So it wouldn’t do well on a EV because it would just kill it. It’s just not designed to give power for a long period of time. It’s designed to zap. To get that gas engine going. And these batteries wouldn’t do good starting the car either. They’re designed to give power over a longer period of time, not a zap that you need to start a gasoline…

Steve Oppenheimer: I imagine the looks you get on the road are much different when you’re driving your Honda Insight versus your Duran.

Stephen Taylor: Well, believe it or not, when I first got the Insight, I was getting all those same kind of looks. I had people that were out on the interstate that were just about colliding when I first got this car because I got it in 2000, and there just wasn’t any of them out on the road. The nice green color. But I don’t get any looks anymore. It’s pretty normal. But this car is people honking. People leaning out their windows, taking pictures.

Steve Oppenheimer: Is half the fun telling the story?

Stephen Taylor: Yes, yes. Definitely. It certainly is.

Ben Lack: So what’s the feel like when you’re driving the car.

Stephen Taylor: Well, it still feel pretty much just like a regular gas-powered car.

Dave Kennington: Just quieter.

Stephen Taylor: Just quieter. That’s about it.

Ben Lack: And are the big difference, obviously the engine’s different.  So are there big maintenance issues that you have to deal with that a normal petrol car wouldn’t?

Dave Kennington: It’s really the other way around. The gas cars require a lot of maintenance. This thing is like a refrigerator. It’s just an electric motor. It requires no oil changes, no tune-ups. These cars really don’t even have transmissions.

Ben Lack: Just a lot less parts.

Dave Kennington: A lot less parts. The only maintenance part really is the batteries. And the new lithium batteries have kind of solved that. They’re now expected to go a hundred thousand miles or more. So really the maintenance on EVs is a very little of anything. Just…

Stephen Taylor: Tires.

Dave Kennington: Tires. They don’t even wear out brakes because the newer systems have regenerative braking, and they use the momentum of the car is recharged the batteries a little bit.

Ben Lack: So what happens when the batteries lose all of its juice? You have to replace it  and then use the car again? Or are you plugging it in order to keep the batteries…

Stephen Taylor: Yes, you plug it in. There are various chargers that you can buy to charge up batteries. You can put an individual charger in each battery.  Generally, you buy one for a whole series of batteries.

Ben Lack: And is that what you’ve done here?

Stephen Taylor: Yes, yes. I don’t actually have the charger on the car at this moment because this car can’t be locked up, and I didn’t want to put a valuable piece of equipment on it. My charger’s actually sitting right here. This little black box here is the battery charger. Actually, we still got plugged in, don’t we? This is a 3.3 kilowatt charger. It’ll charge this car up in two to three hours actually because the battery pack isn’t that big. If it was a lithium battery, it might take six or seven because it would be able to go a lot further.

Steve Oppenheimer: So you mentioned that you need to plan your trips in your electric vehicles at this point in time. Have you had any events that were unplanned that left you stranded and how did you deal with that?

Stephen Taylor: I’ve never had a point where, unplanned, I was stranded. The only time we got stranded was we did an event up in Jackson County which is about eighty miles away and took my RAV4 up there. No problem. It has a hundred mile range. We got up there. There problem occurred, they didn’t have the right type of plug. So I went to home depot and bought an extension cord. The extension cord was wired incorrectly and blew my charger up. So I had to come back home and get a tow dolly and tow the car back home.

Steve Oppenheimer: Let’s talk a minute about how the major car manufacturers plan to deal with that in the cars that are coming to the mass market. I understand that there’s standardized charging systems agreed to…

Dave Kennington: J1772. Yeah.

Steve Oppenheimer: And as well, there’s very sophisticated reporting in the car on your range and capability. And I understand there are applications coming for our telephones to tell us where there’s charging stations. Speak to some of that…

Dave Kennington: Actually, on the Leaf, the new Nissan, which is the car we heard the most about, there’s an app where the car actually has built-in GPS. Shows you where any and all public charging stations are. And if you run close on your range, the car will start bugging you to go charge it. It will start saying, “You need to charge me.” Then eventually it will get to the point where it’ll say, “Go straight to this charger that’s at this mall or wherever the charger happens to be,” and hopefully try to prevent those events. What we found thought is that it’s actually not that big of a problem. The Leaf is supposed to have a hundred mile range. And what I found is I almost never drive more than a hundred miles in a day, and my car’s in my garage all night anyway.

Steve Oppenheimer: Actually, I believe the DOE statistic is that seventy-five percent of the day use of cars are less than forty or forty-five miles.

Dave Kennington: That’s pretty close.

Steve Oppenheimer: And we’re here in Atlanta, is there a charge structure beginning to be deployed here for the roll-out of the cars?

Stephen Taylor: Well, not at this moment. There are plans for it, but nothing has actually been installed. There used to be chargers all over in the mall, most of the malls and in parking lots of some office buildings. In fact, that’s where this beauty came that I used to charge the RAV4. This is an old technology that won’t be used again.

Ben Lack: What is this?

Stephen Taylor: This is an inductive paddle charger. So it creates a magnetic field that the RAV4 then turns back into electricity. It was determined to be somewhat inefficient in that you’re going from electricity to magnetic field then going back from magnetic field to electricity. You’re kind of going two different energy transmission methods. You lose certain percentage of your energy when you do that kind of thing.

Dave Kennington: New stuff is all going to be conductive. It’s all going to be, it’s a smart plug, but it’s nonetheless a plug. Just like you would plug in your dryer or your washing machine or whatever.

Steve Oppenheimer: And many of the cars are also going to have the ability to charge from a standard household plug as well as…

Dave Kennington: At this point, all of them I’ve heard of also have a 110-volt regular house current option. That’ll be slow, but…

Steve Oppenheimer: You’ll never be stuck.

Dave Kennington: You’ll never be stuck.

Stephen Taylor: And then the Chevy Volt with a forty-mile range, even a 110, you can fill it up overnight.

Dave Kennington: Yeah. I would think Chevy Volt people would probably a lot of them will be fine with the 110 charger.

Steve Oppenheimer: And the Chevy Volt is actually going to carry an onboard generator that to produce electricity for the engine, that will extend the range well above a hundred miles.

Dave Kennington: Yeah, you can basically drive it to Florida just like any other car. You just put gas in it instead of plugging it in.

Steve Oppenheimer: So there we’re past the range issue. Steve, what’s the next car in your fleet we might look at?

Stephen Taylor: The Yaris is actually my most recent purchase.

Steve Oppenheimer: Get the license plate, too. That’s kind of interesting.

Stephen Taylor: Now the RAV has the same kind of license plate, the alternative fuel tag. That allows me to drive in the HOV lanes by myself. It is also the way that I pay my road taxes. It’s twenty-five dollars, and that goes to road repair. Since I don’t buy gasoline, I wouldn’t be paying any road tax unless I had this tag on my car.

Steve Oppenheimer: That’s the deal of the century, paying your transportation taxes for twenty-five dollars a year.

Dave Kennington: Yeah, no kidding.

Steve Oppenheimer: They’re going to catch up with us on that.

Stephen Taylor: You can see most of the working components are underneath here. Once again, they still have the auxiliary battery that does the same thing than the RAV4 that just keeps the clocks running and everything while the car’s off. The motor in this car is actually down here. Got a fan on it permanently so they put a cowling around it. So it’s kind of hard to see it, but the fan blows air across it to keep it cool. The gear box is connected directly to the motor. And the gear box just takes the, it’s a gear reducer essentially.

Dave Kennington: Yeah, it’s not a transmission at all. It’s just a gear reducer.

Stephen Taylor: Right. And so it goes directly from there to the wheels. The motor is controlled by this box right here. This is the controller of the car. So the controller takes the power from the battery pack, and then the input from my accelerator pedal and tells the motor how fast to go. There’s no gears, no shifting, or anything. So this tells the car how fast it wants to go. This is my battery charger for the battery pack. Once again, it’s a 3.3 kilowatt charger. In this car because I have a range of, depending on how fast to go from a hundred and twenty to two hundred miles or so…

Ben Lack: Per charge?

Stephen Taylor: Per charge, it could take twelve, thirteen hours to charge this car up with this charger. You could have two of these chargers in the car and do it in half the time.

Dave Kennington: A lot of people don’t understand this, but if you drive less than the full range of the car, it takes less time to charge.

Stephen Taylor: Quite a bit less, yeah.

Steve Oppenheimer: So it’s not like that necessarily like that type of battery that you have to run all the way down to empty and recharge.

Dave Kennington: It’s kind of like if you filled up your gas car when you only use one or two gallons, it would take a very short time to fill it up.

Ben Lack: One of the things that I’ve noticed with all the cars that you’ve showed us is that what’s under the hood is different in every single one. Is that because the technology’s been evolving or you’ve been trying different components to see how the different EVs are going to work? Or is that just the way that they’re made?

Dave Kennington: I’ll answer that one. Yeah, it’s because the technology’s been evolving. Like I was saying, the technology in my Honda Del Sol conversion is decades old now whereas this is a much more modern system. This is a much more efficient AC drive system. This is a conversion, but it’s a very nice one. It’s very well done.

Steve Oppenheimer: So EV Innovation Incorporated is a shop in North Carolina that does conversions.

Stephen Taylor: They actually call themselves Lithium-Ion Motors now, but I think you can still look them up as EV Innovations.

Dave Kennington: Tell them about your lithium-polymer battery pack.

Stephen Taylor: The batteries in this car, essentially, they took out the back seat in this car. So this is now a two-door station wagon.

Steve Oppenheimer: Can we take a peek?

Stephen Taylor: Yeah, we come around the back.

Dave Kennington: Can’t really see much.

Stephen Taylor: Yeah, there’s not much to see.

Steve Oppenheimer: At least it’ll get us in the shade.

Stephen Taylor: You can see this is still where the spare tire goes. And I put some spare cables in here just in case so I could charge up pretty much anywhere. This car, by the way, can charge on 110 too or 220. So that’s why I have all these little adapters.

Steve Oppenheimer: There’s something else in here. I notice you have a digital tire inflater that having the tires properly inflated relates to optimal mileage.

Stephen Taylor: Right, right.

Steve Oppenheimer: Whether it’s gas or electricity.

Stephen Taylor: We in the club, I know the auto manufacturers don’t like, but we in the club always pretty much fill our tires up to the maximum of what the tire says, not what the manufacturer says on the car. Because that’s where you’ll get the best gas miles or electric miles or whatever kind of miles or range that you’re going to get. In a gas-powered car, you get better, usually those numbers that they put on the car are more for as much for comfort as for anything else. And tires actually where better with a higher pressure.

Steve Oppenheimer: And the battery is in the next compartment?

Stephen Taylor: Yeah, the battery pack is right here. I’ve never actually seen them. They’re eighty-eight 100 amp hour cells in the car. And I’ve never actually seen them so I can’t tell you what they look like.

Dave Kennington: It rates a two hundred mile range if this car is driven very carefully.

Steve Oppenheimer: So you mentioned something else. You mentioned “we in the club.” Tell me do you have a group of enthusiasts that get together that share this passion and also own vehicles.

Stephen Taylor: Oh, yes. In fact, David is the president of the club.

Ben Lack: What’s the name of the club?

Dave Kennington: EV Club of the South. And it’s evclubsouth.org on the web if you want to check us out.

Steve Oppenheimer: And are there clubs like this around the country? Is this part of a national organization of enthusiasts?

Dave Kennington: Pretty much. We’re a chapter of the EAA. On the web, it’s eaaev.org. We had to put the EV on there because the Experimental Aircraft Association has just plain EAA. It’s eaaev.org.

Ben Lack: And do those letters stand for?

Dave Kennington: Electric Auto Association, and EV is Electric Vehicle.

Steve Oppenheimer: Stephen, are there any other cars that we can look at?

Stephen Taylor: It will be real quick, but it’s not really a car. It’s an electric tractor. This is actually what I cut my grass with. This was actually made in Canada. The Electric Ox. It’ll cut four, five acres at a time. In the night, just plug it in again and charge more later in the day if I want to.

Steve Oppenheimer: Looks like a pretty normal tractor to me.

Stephen Taylor: Yeah, except for it’s quiet. And once again, it doesn’t make any noise when you turn it on. I’ll turn it on for you, and you’ll see.

Steve Oppenheimer: It’s on?

Stephen Taylor: It’s on.

Ben Lack: You’re kidding.

Stephen Taylor: It makes noise when you drive. With the trailer, it’s making some noise. It has regenerative braking on it just like the car. It actually has an auto-park too. When the thing stops, it puts on the parking brake. So I don’t even have to put a brake on. I get reverse just like anything else.

Steve Oppenheimer: Price-wise, how does that compare to a regular tractor?

Stephen Taylor: Well, I bought this about five years ago when it was extremely expensive. It was about $10,000 versus the equivalent line of $3,000 in the gas one.

Steve Oppenheimer: How about today?

Stephen Taylor: Today, they’re more like four or five thousand dollars.

Steve Oppenheimer: So it’s just marginally more expensive. And again, you’re going to have all the savings of operation and ownership.

Stephen Taylor: And there are lot more companies building these now.

Dave Kennington: Actually, you can buy an electric yard tractor from Home Depot now. You have to special order it. It’s made by Erion.

Stephen Taylor: Something like that. But it’s generally cost like eighteen hundred dollars I think.

Dave Kennington: Three thousand dollars.

Stephen Taylor: Are they three thousand?

Dave Kennington: Yeah.

Ben Lack: What’s between your legs? Is that a battery?

Stephen Taylor: This is actually one of the nicest things because I live on a large track of land. And what’s between my legs is actually an inverter. So what I can do is, I kind of did this myself to keep it from getting hurt, but this gives me a 120-volt power anywhere I want on the yard. So I can take my little electric lawn or pruners, chainsaw or whatever, I can take it anywhere out there and cut with electricity instead of trying to drag a thousand feet of…

Dave Kennington: Extension cord.

Stephen Taylor: …extension cord or using a really smelly gas chainsaw or weed whacker or whatever. It was another option. Part of the reason it was a little more expensive when I did that. I always forget to tell people about that.

Ben Lack: So I’m curious what your monthly electric bill was before you started your building of your EV fleet and what your electric bill is now that you’re plugging in your vehicles.

Stephen Taylor: I still probably don’t think I spend more than about twenty bucks a month on electricity for my electric vehicles. And that’s probably a couple thousand miles worth of driving.

Ben Lack: Of all the vehicles that you have, are there ones that you drive most of the time, and then there’s some that you drive for hobby or sport?

Stephen Taylor: I actually drive the Yaris pretty much everyday, and my wife drives the RAV4. So that’s kind of the everyday cars.

Dave Kennington: And she drives the electric car from the suburbs here to downtown Atlanta.

Stephen Taylor: Right, right. She drives it down to Morehouse.

Ben Lack: And how far away are we from the city?

Stephen Taylor: We’re about twenty-five miles, depending on where you’re going from the city.

Ben Lack: So if you’re stuck in a little bit of traffic, it maybe takes your forty-five minutes to get to town?

Stephen Taylor: Yeah, forty-five minutes would be a good estimate even without traffic from here. But the electric car really doesn’t care how long it takes. It’s not like a gas car. You really are using almost no energy when you’re stopped in stop-and-go traffic unless you’re running the air conditioner or something like that.

Dave Kennington: Your range actually improves when you get stuck in traffic.

Stephen Taylor: Going twenty, twenty-five miles an hour makes all these cars a lot further than we’ve been quoting.

Steve Oppenheimer: So may we look at Stripe? This is the car that he’s sold and really belongs to somebody else. But it’s part of the fleet, and we want to take a look at that too.

Now wait a minute. We have an electric car here, but it says diesel fuel only. I’m a little confused. What’s going on?

Stephen Taylor: This car actually started its life in Buffalo. It was in the New York Energy Authorities fleet of cars. Since it was in Buffalo, they needed to have a little stouter heating system. This has a ceramic heater in it that’s 1,500 watts. But you’re in Buffalo. Fifteen hundred watts is not going to heat the car.

Steve Oppenheimer: Oh, so this is for the heater and not the engine.

Stephen Taylor: That’s strictly for heating. It will not even operate. It’s set so that it will not operate unless it’s below forty degrees outside. So in Atlanta, it hardly ever gets used.

Steve Oppenheimer: So basically, we’re looking at a custom or professional conversion done by this company Selectria.

Stephen Taylor: Right, right.

Steven Oppenheimer: Now are they still doing conversions?

Stephen Taylor: Well, they got bought out by Azer. Azer is what the drive system is in the Yaris. The Yaris just has the update drive system that this car has. Because 110, this is the controller. The motor’s on back behind it. This is one of the battery boxes right here. This has nightcap batteries, and here’s the air conditioning system.

Dave Kennington: Kind of a second generation battery.

Stephen Taylor: This is the air conditioning system on it, the original compressor with the separate electric motor tied to it.

Steve Oppenheimer: Now I like the logo on the side of the car. Did Selectria do that?

Stephen Taylor: No actually the New York Energy Authority did that apparently. I didn’t put that on. I put he racing strips on the car because I thought it made the cars look bigger. People tell me, “Oh, you’re driving a Ford Taurus.” The Selectria did the forest and obviously the Selectria graphic, but the “Little Juice Coupe” was added by the New York Energy Authority.

Steve Oppenheimer: Great looking car. Looks like fun.

Stephen Taylor: Yep. They are. And practical.

Dave Kennington: I’ve done one conversion of this Honda Del Sol out here.

Steve Oppenheimer: So this is your car. You’ve got your alternative fuel vehicle plate.

Dave Kennington: Yeah. Just like Stephen’s cars. This car has old technology lead batteries. There’s five of them back here in the trunk and five of them in the front. This is a hobbyist-tone mini conversion.

Steve Oppenheimer: I want to see one more thing.

Dave Kennington: Okay.

Steve Oppenheimer: I see you’re a little neater than Stephen with your wiring.

Dave Kennington: Yeah.

Steve Oppenheimer: I mean, look how clean this is. And you did this at home in your garage, huh?

Dave Kennington: Yeah, yeah. Well, I am kind of an electrician.

Steve Oppenheimer: It looks to me you still…

Dave Kennington: I have a little more professional…

Steve Oppenheimer: Looks to me like you still have room for one or two golf bags in here.

Dave Kennington: Yeah, the spare tire would still fit in here. I choose not to bring it. I just threw my can of Fix-a-Flat in here somewhere. It’s over there.

Steve Oppenheimer: The engine, did it start in the front or did it start originally in the back?

Dave Kennington: This was a front-wheel drive car originally.

Steve Oppenheimer: Oh, more batteries.

Dave Kennington: More batteries up here. This is a 120-volt DC conversion. This is like forklift technology. People have been doing conversions like this for fifty years.

Ben Lack: And what’s this piece right here?

Dave Kennington: This?

Ben Lack: Yes.

Dave Kennington: Okay. This car has five twenty-four volt chargers. That’s what these black things are. This part right down here is the motor controller. It’s kind of like the carburetor on a gas car. It controls the flow of power to the motor. You’re probably not going to be able to see the motor. It’s under this battery tray down here.

Steve Oppenheimer: What’s your range?

Dave Kennington: This car will go about forty miles. Again with eighteen hundred lead-acid battery technology. This car actually is pretty useful to me. My commute to work is 12.6 miles. Like I say, I rarely go even forty miles in a day.

Steve Oppenheimer: How do you think your personal cost to charge the car over the year compared to purchasing gasoline over a year compare?

Dave Kennington: Current gas price is about $2.50 a gallon. That won’t last long. It’ll go up. It’s eight to ten time as expensive to drive a gas car as it is to drive an EV.

Steve Oppenheimer: Wait a minute. And you’re saying the maintenance is required is less also.

Dave Kennington: Almost nothing.

Steve Oppenheimer: So that’s additional savings.

Dave Kennington: That’s additional savings.

Steve Oppenheimer: Fascinating.

Dave Kennington: A car like this has been possible since the fifties. So I really can’t see that the technology wasn’t there in the seventies. I think we just chose not to do it. Gas got cheap again.

Ben Lack: Is your insurance higher or lower?

Dave Kennington: No it’s the same.

Ben Lack: Okay. And will you show us real quick what this plug looks like?

Dave Kennington: Yeah, sure. This is a just standard 120-volt power plug just like everybody already has in their garage.

Ben Lack: And all you got to do is just plug it into that.

Dave Kennington: Plug it in to that.

Steve Oppenheimer: So this is a standard like you’d plug a lamp into?

Dave Kennington: Anything. This is what everybody has in their house. It’s just your standard 120-volt outlet.

Steve Oppenheimer: So this is not rocket science?

Dave Kennington: This is not rocket science.

Ben Lack: So a normal RAV4 like anybody else would buy on the market.

Stephen Taylor: No. No, this is not. I actually bought this baby on Ebay. Once again, these cars were sold because of the California Zero Emissions rules that were established in the late nineties essentially and were abandoned in 2003. This is a 2002 model. There were only a few 2003 models because California abandoned the policy in very early 2003, and they stopped selling immediately. This is a nickel metal hydride battery instead of lead-acid. So it has about a hundred-mile range. The range is really more like seventy to a hundred and twenty, depending on how you drive it. This car actually has about 110,000 miles on it right now. I bought it just recently on Ebay. I guess I’ll show you under the hood here.

Steve Oppenheimer: Of course, we got to look under the hood.

Stephen Taylor: Once again, you have the old box that covers everything up. This box looks very similar to what you’d see in a Prius except for a little bit bigger. Most of what you see here other than the box, all this is actually the heat pump system for the cabinet. Cool and heating the car. An electric car doesn’t create any heat. So you have to create your own heat. For a heater. So this is a heat pump unlike some electric cars would use some kind of a electric heater like a conductive resistant heater. This uses a heat pump instead which is a little more efficient.

This is actually the radiator to cool the electronics of the car and the motor. You can see how small it is compared to a regular car radiator. This is the charge port where that panel where the charger goes in and the panel up here actually pops out so that you don’t have to pull the hood up.

Dave Kennington: I think this thing is fascinating because this really shows how much more efficient these electric cars are than internal combustion cars. That’s all the waste he…

Stephen Taylor: The really interesting thing about it, even though it’s so small, in all the time I’ve own this car, I’ve never seen the fan come on in this car. I don’t know if this thing actually even does…

Dave Kennington: Or if it’s even necessary.

Stephen Taylor: It’s even necessary because I’ve never seen this fan come on. No matter how hot it is outside, it doesn’t seem to ever come on.

Steve Oppenheimer: And there’s no ancillary gas engine in this car. It’s a hundred percent electric.

Stephen Taylor: A hundred percent electric.

Ben Lack: What’s everything here on the right side?

Stephen Taylor: Just fuses. Really these are all just fuse boxes here. Power steering, fluid.

Ben Lack: All traditional stuff that you would see in any vehicle.

Stephen Taylor: And we do have a normal auxiliary battery if you notice. It’s not one of the ones that drives the car. That just runs the computers and everything while the car’s off.

Dave Kennington: Windshield wipers, lights.

Stephen Taylor: But only when the car’s off because when the car’s on, it has own DC-DC converter to make the 12-volt systems. So it’s really just sitting there keeping things running. Because you’ve got clocks in your car, you got computers. It also actually runs a timer that allows me to tell this car when to charge. Even the older generation, they already had figured it out. The best time to charge electric cars is at night when nobody is really using electricity. So this has a timer built into it so I can program it to charge at night.

Steve Oppenheimer: So you’ve referred to Ebay. Are there any other places that people can buy electric cars these days?

Stephen Taylor: Well, there are conversion shops around the country like where I had my Yaris converted. There are some of those you can buy. And Tesla is out there if you want to really, really high-end car. If you want a slower car, you can buy Zap or Zims.

Steve Oppenheimer: What’s a good resource for people that are curious and would like to find out more about what’s available today? Where would you direct them?

Stephen Taylor: I like to steer people to evfinder.com. That’s all he does really is he has a list of all these cars that get to come out. All the cars that are out now. And then he also has a section for classifieds which includes all the Ebay listings and all that so. That’s the best place to actually look for a car if you’re trying to get one right now.

Steve Oppenheimer: And does evfinder.com also reference the companies doing conversions?

Stephen Taylor: Not as much. No. A lot of those people are kind of unknown. They’re people that just sort of take up shop.

Steve Oppenheimer: Somebody had mentioned to me pluginamerica.com. Is that a resource to find some of those people?

Dave Kennington: Yeah. I think so. The thing about the conversion shops is some of them come and go. Of course, some of them have been around for thirty years. But it’s really kind of hard to keep up with them because you just never know if they’re going to be in business in a couple of years.

Steve Oppenheimer: For instance, is there anybody here in Atlanta that does conversions?

Dave Kennington: There is. Thormac. I think right now they’re working on a Porsche Boxster conversion. They’re a fairly new company. A couple of Georgia Tech grads.

Steve Oppenheimer: Would you say there are startups like that in cities around America?

Dave Kennington: I would say that’s pretty common. And there’s been a lot more interest since gas was four bucks a gallon a couple of years ago. Nothing gets people’s attention like an assault on their wallet.

Ben Lack: One thing that we haven’t heard yet is the actual sound of one of these electric cars. So I’m curious to know if you wouldn’t mind turning the car on and having the viewers hear the difference between what they’re normally used to and what an EV vehicle sounds like.

Stephen Taylor: Okay. It’s on.

Steve Oppenheimer: Oh, come on. Turn it on.

Ben Lack: Are you serious?

Steve Oppenheimer: It’s on?

Stephen Taylor: That’s it. Yep. You hear the little hum?

Ben Lack: Yeah. So what is the hum?

Stephen Taylor: I don’t really know. It’s an electronic hum.

Steve Oppenheimer: Can it be a fan? I don’t know.

Stephen Taylor: Some cars are completely quiet. Like I said, this has a little hum. My Yaris has a big fan that comes on so it really makes a fair amount of noise, at least for an EV. Prius is completely quiet. You wouldn’t even hear it at all in electric.

Steve Oppenheimer: Alright, so now we’re actually going to go for a ride. We’re going to go to lunch, and we’re in Stephen’s RAV4. And, Steve, if you’d start up the car. Let’s go ahead and get going. Turn on the car.

Stephen Taylor: It’s on.

Steve Oppenheimer: Oh, it’s on. Okay.

Ben Lack: Okay. Let’s do it.

Dave Kennington: Your clue is the power locks. When the power locks go click…

Stephen Taylor: There’s also a ready light over here that comes on. The power locks are something I had added. So not something the standard RAV would make. And you can hear, turn the air conditioner on. You don’t even hear hardly any noise on that either.

Steve Oppenheimer: And we’ve got a full charge.

Stephen Taylor: Well, that’s actually about a little under ninety percent.

Ben Lack: Very quiet.

Stephen Taylor: You want to roll the windows up?

Steve Oppenheimer: Sure. Do we have enough electricity to run the air?

Stephen Taylor: Oh, of course.

Steve Oppenheimer: The heat here in Georgia. It’s eleven o’clock, and it’s probably ninety degrees already.

Dave Kennington: Yeah, I’d say close anyway.

Ben Lack: So for the people in the car. Does anybody feel any different in the drive itself now that we’re on the road?

Dave Kennington: It’s pretty much like a regular RAV4. It’s just quiet.

Steve Oppenheimer: You know what? This little car actually feels pretty powerful.

Stephen Taylor: They’ve got it toned down a little bit for low-speed driving, but it has a lot of torque.

Steve Oppenheimer: What’s its maximum speed?

Stephen Taylor: Eighty something.

Dave Kennington: I think it’s about eighty. Yeah.

Ben Lack: And what do you feel comfortable taking it to?

Stephen Taylor: Oh, I wouldn’t have any problem going to eighty except for I don’t like to drive that fast because it’s not efficient. So I normally go about right around sixty on the interstate. I go sixty-five if I’m in a sixty-five zone. Going downtown, I try to stay sixty or less.

Ben Lack: Is there a certain speed where you start to get diminishing returns?

Stephen Taylor: Yeah. Once you start getting much over fifty-five, the wind resistance is going to really start dragging you down quite a bit.

Steve Oppenheimer: Now that’s really true for all cars. But if you’re mindful of your output then the mileage that you’re getting from whatever source be it petroleum or electricity, that’s a factor. Now does this car have the pep that you need for response on Atlanta highways, for changing the lanes and…

Ben Lack: So we’re at thirty-five, forty, forty-five, fifty.

Stephen Taylor: We’re past speed limit now.

Steve Oppenheimer: And now we are switching drivers. Ben, have you driven an electric car before?

Ben Lack: No, I never have. Everything looks the same.

Steve Oppenheimer: Well, this is a red-letter day.

Stephen Taylor: This car drives exactly like an electric car.

Dave Kennington: Like an automatic transmission RAV4.

Steve Oppenheimer: Ben, do you have a driver’s license?

Ben Lack: I sure do.

Steve Oppenheimer: Okay.

Ben Lack: It’s not on me. Oh, wow.

Steve Oppenheimer: Ben, why the “oh, wow”? What’s your take here?

Ben Lack: I still feel like I’m hugging the road. Like I drive a Volvo, but there’s not a much friction that I feel in the steering wheel as I would in maybe my Volvo or any of my friends’ or family’s cars. It definitely feels like I’m having a similar experience as I would with what I’ve got now.

Steve Oppenheimer: Steve, why are you excited this car and what it represents?

Stephen Taylor: There’s a certain quality level refinement that you get out of an OEM car that you don’t get out of a conversion. The conversion will do all the basics, and they’re great cars. But these just feel so much nicer. So I just feel like when the Nissan Leaf comes out that we’re going to have a nice refined electric car out there again just like the RAV4 except for better because it’s going to be ten years…

Ben Lack: New technology. You know what’s interesting, and I’m going to make a quick point about the drive is that I’m going forty miles an hour right now, and it doesn’t feel like I’m going that fast. That’s interesting. If I’m not paying attention, I’ll be going faster than I really think I’m going. Like right now I’m going almost fifty, and it doesn’t feel like I’m going fifty.

Stephen Taylor: That’s what happened to me when I first got it to was I’d be sitting here talking and the next thing you know I’m going fifty-five in a forty zone. It’s like, “Whoa!” You just don’t realize because of how smooth and quiet these cars are.

Ben Lack: With the engine being loud as you’re revving it up, you’re feeling and hearing that it’s going faster. But when you have the silence, it definitely no more attention.

Dave Kennington: You don’t feel the vibration that you do from an engine when it revs.

Stephen Taylor: Or the shifting or anything like that.

Ben Lack: Right.

Stephen Taylor: Now this has got a 110,000 miles on it. So it’s not a spring chicken either. It’s not like you’re driving a brand new car.

Ben Lack: And because it’s factory, it’s a 110,00 miles as an EV.

Stephen Taylor: Right. Exactly.

Dave Kennington: And this car’s never had an oil change. Never had a tune-up. Never had any real maintenance of any sort that you would normally expect. And, Stephen, how do you feel? I think it runs like a new car.

Stephen Taylor: Oh, yeah. That’s why I like OEM cars.

Ben Lack: Do you have an idea of how many miles you think you could get out of something like this?

Stephen Taylor: I think the batteries will be the only thing that can wear out of this car other than the tires.

Dave Kennington: What have we heard? The batteries are good for about 150,000 miles?

Stephen Taylor: Some people have gotten up that high. Yes.

Ben Lack: So as long as you replace the battery and the wheels and don’t wreck it, you should be able to take this for as long you’d want.

Stephen Taylor: Yeah. I think as long as any 400,000, 500,000 miles…

Dave Kennington: Easy.

Stephen Taylor: Maybe a million. But I wouldn’t drive it that much.

Dave Kennington: There’s one moving part and the motor and that’s just about it. There’s no clutches, no valves. All the zillion little worrying, wearing out parts in a internal combustion vehicle are just not there.

Steve Oppenheimer: So, Ben, sum up your take on…

Ben Lack: I got to say, first time, very cool. Very cool. And I think the reason why it’s so cool is that I don’t feel that much of a difference between this vehicle and some of the other vehicles that I’ve driven. So thanks, guys, for showing us all the different vehicles that you guys have and giving us a little bit of insight on  technology and kind of the evolution. And we will definitely be staying in touch. Thanks, Stephen, and, Dave, thank you very much.

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