Fri, Sep 05, 2008
 Todd Poelstra cruises to work in his Xebra, an electric car with 72 volts, one gear and no transmission. The Xebra is a three-wheeled vehicle, technically a motorcycle, that gets plugged in every night, Poelstra said. Some people are using electric vehicles to cut emissions or to save on gas, or both, by using Neighborhood Electric Vehicles, or NEVs. A.E. Araiza / Arizona Daily Star
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Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 06.09.2008
Electric cars are here. Again.
They've been here before. They approached the popularity of gasoline-powered cars around the beginning of the last century, before cheap gasoline helped kill them off.
And there was a bit of an electric-car buzz in Tucson in the mid-1990s when General Motors picked Tucson as one of a handful of Southwestern cities in which to lease its EV-1 electric cars.
(Which were later taken back by GM and crushed, fueling activists' theories about a Detroit/Big Oil conspiracy.)
Tucson even had an electric-vehicle club in the 1980s, a group of, mostly, do-it-yourselfers who built their own electrics or converted conventional gas-powered vehicles to battery electric power.
In one way, the problem with electric cars is the same as it was in about 1900 — batteries. The power running most of today's Neighborhood Electric Vehicles is coming from essentially the same source as those in the earliest days of the automobile: the lead-acid battery.
Today, record oil prices — and environmental and geopolitical concerns — are driving interest in the electric car. And an improvement in the battery could put the modern EV on the road in numbers.
There are waiting lists to buy gas-electric hybrid vehicles at premium prices.
There is even more enthusiasm for promised "plug-in" hybrids — versions of existing gas-electric hybrids with extra batteries that will allow them to run 60 or more miles on stored electricity alone, without using a gas engine.
But some Tucsonans aren't waiting.
Travis & Kim Huxman
Travis Huxman says goodbye to wife Kim and daughters Ali and Zoe and whirs out the driveway of their Midtown home in their electric car.
It's a "tie day" for Huxman; otherwise he'd be riding his bicycle the 2 1/2 miles to the University of Arizona campus.
Huxman, a UA associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and director of Biosphere 2, says he saves the electric-powered commutes for days when he needs to dress up for meetings. The family also has a Volkswagen Vanagon.
The Huxmans' NEV is a modified golf cart, decked out with the headlights, brake- and taillights, horn and windshield needed to make it a street-legal Neighborhood Electric Vehicle (registered by the state and allowed on roads with posted speed limits of 35 miles per hour or less).
Travis may be the one with the environmental and ecological credentials, but "I'm the instigator," says Kim.
"When we moved here (six years ago), I had a 1968 Mustang that probably got eight miles per gallon. At that point, I realized we've got to make a change."
At first, they moved near El Con, shortening avid bicyclist Travis' commute to the UA. It worked most days, except in bad weather, or on those "tie days."
But then they saw neighbor Sally Day's "little golf cart," Kim says. "I talked to her."
Kim says they originally intended to use a photovoltaic system to recharge the cart, taking it off the grid and erasing its "carbon footprint." But some friends had their expensive solar cells stolen from their roof.
Still, the Huxmans figure, it costs only a few dollars a month to keep their EV's batteries charged.
Todd Poelstra & Sally Day
Sally Day is a familiar site around the Sam Hughes neighborhood in Midtown — or rather her pea-green Zap Xena EV is.
And her husband, Todd Poelstra, is virtually a celebrity on his commutes along East Speedway to the Pima Community College West Campus.
Day, a set designer, and Poelstra, of the PCC theater arts department, started out with a Neighborhood Electric Vehicle — more closely related to a golf cart than their current fully enclosed, buglike Zap Xebra.
The Xebra is a three-wheeled, four-door, four-seat NEV sedan with a manufacturer's suggested retail price of $11,700. The manufacturer claims a top speed of 45 mph.
They've put 4,500 miles on it in the year since they ordered it and had it shipped out from Los Angeles. Poelstra says it has a 25-mile range, plenty for his slightly more than six-mile-each-way commute.
"We can't go to Phoenix," says Poelstra. "But I don't want to go to Phoenix."
He says the Xebra eats $10 to $12 worth of electricity each month — or it would, "but we have solar."
Dan Bish
Dan Bish is no newcomer to EVs, positives and minuses. The television electrical engineer understands what's going on underneath the hood.
His used GEM (Global Electric Motors) Car, an electric golf cart upgraded to federal standards for use as a NEV, is parked for the moment, in need of another set of batteries. With a new controller and a set of factory replacement batteries, that will cost him about $2,500.
Still, he's put about 5,500 miles on it in the last few years and plans to get it on the road again.
The federal Neighborhood Electric Vehicle rule got states to agree to let EVs equipped with seat belts, headlights, brake lights, turn signals, a horn and windshield operate on roads with speed limits of 35 mph or less. And states were limited in how much they could charge to license NEVs.
Bish says he pays about $18 annually to license his GEM Car.
Batteries, say Bish and most who have any experience with EVs, are the weak spot in going electric.
Most EVs still use deep-cycle, lead-acid batteries, like those used in wheelchairs and golf carts for many years.
Unlike automotive batteries, deep-cycle batteries are meant to be discharged and then recharged, unlike car batteries, which are almost immediately recharged every time they are asked to put out more power than they're receiving from the car's charging system.
The problem is, lead-acid batteries don't put out much power for their weight — meaning that for an EV to have much range, it has to carry so much weight in batteries that it has trouble going up hills and accelerating.
And although they are meant to be discharged more fully than conventional automotive batteries, their life is shortened if they are repeatedly fully discharged.
The higher power-per-pound lithium-ion and nickel-metal hydride batteries used in laptop computers are much more expensive than lead-acid batteries.
And although Toyota's Prius and other gas-electric hybrids use the more expensive batteries, their price is out of reach for most small-volume EV manufacturers' customers.
Still, says Bish, "the thing would save me money even as yard art because I get a multi-car discount on my insurance." His other car is a gas-hungry Chevrolet van.
Jerry Callanan
Jerry Callanan would seem either the most, or least, likely EV driver.
He's a retired Ford autoworker living in Tucson Estates, where golf carts were as common as bald spots long before the latest electric-vehicle wave.
There are times in Tucson Estates when three or four golf carts will be on the same street, outnumbering conventional vehicles.
He frequently cruises around the tidy mobile-home community off Kinney and Ajo roads in his Classic Club Car, essentially a golf cart, resorting to his gas-thirsty SUV or his wife's big Buick sedan only for errands or appointments "in town."
Callanan says he doesn't take his EV outside the community's low-speed road network. But most of his errands are local, often to help less computer-savvy residents with their PCs.
"But I put more miles on this than on my (Ford) Expedition anymore," says Callanan.
He says "batteries are definitely the weak spot" in EVs, costing him $1,000 to $1,200 for a new set of batteries every few years.
Mike Spacone
Mike Spacone got his $10,500 GEM Car Neighborhood Electric Vehicle for a fraction of its listed price.
He doesn't remember the exact details, but he took advantage of the Arizona Legislature's alternative-fuels program — which turned into a boondoggle when a large number of participants used a loophole to put tiny LPG tanks in gas-hog SUVs and pickups, and got the state's taxpayers to pick up most of the price of the vehicle.
Spacone and his family have used the four-seater golf-cart-style NEV for several years to run local errands.
"We use it to go to the park, go on dates, go to Casa Video, to the UA or Downtown, tailgate for football games," says Spacone. "We've got two little kids. It's a four-seater; we put two car seats in it.
"We stick to neighborhood streets or go through campus.
"If you ever had an accident in it, you'd lose. I wouldn't want to go faster (than the 35-mph NEV limit) in it. I only go on big streets when I'm by myself."
The big hope
The latest buzz on green vehicles is the plug-in electric hybrid.
Aftermarket kits for the Toyota Prius and Honda Civic gas-electric hybrids cost around $10,000 and add some batteries to allow the cars to make fairly long commutes strictly off stored electric power.
But the breakthrough is expected when the original vehicles' manufacturers add the plug-in feature.
Current hybrids use a relatively small gasoline engine to move the vehicle when stored electrical power isn't enough to meet the driver's demand.
The gas engine charges the batteries, as does a regenerative braking system that captures energy and sends it back to the batteries.
The ratio of power a battery can store to its weight is pushing development of new formula batteries.
Many EV advocates hope the technology trickles down to the all-electric market with lower prices for higher-power and lower-weight batteries.
● Contact reporter Dan Sorenson at 573-4185 or dsorenson@azstarnet.com.
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