The new car Bob Earnest bought this past September has gotten him a lot of attention from his neighbors on isolated Chebeague Island – one of the few remaining year-round island communities to dot Maine’s coast – but not for the usual reasons. His new ride isn’t tricked out with chrome trim or the latest in GPS technology. It doesn’t start itself on cold mornings or have heated calfskin seats. There’s no voice-controlled MP3 player, and no plasma screens on the seats so folks in the back can watch their favorite shows. In fact, there aren’t even any backseats.
With a sticker price of only about $12,000, Earnest’s new car eschews nearly all of the high-tech bells and whistles that commonly set jaws wagging in this increasingly hard to please consumer climate. And, here’s the clincher; it only reaches speeds of 25 miles per hour.
Earnest, a builder who specializes in environmentally friendly homes, is one of the few dozen people in Southern Maine to have purchased a 100 percent electric-powered car from Maine Electric Vehicles in Falmouth, a suburb of Portland, since the business opened this past fall.
"We’d been interested in that kind of alternative transportation for a while," says Earnest, who has been producing his own biodiesel for his work truck for a number of years.
Earnest and his wife also own a Toyota Prius – the world’s first commercially produced gas/electric hybrid vehicle – that serves as their primary "off-island" car. When the time came for their family to purchase a second car, the Earnests initially bought another Prius. But they were disappointed to discover that the celebrated fuel-efficient hybrid technology wasn’t as practical for short-distance island driving as it was on the highway. Hybrid engines are designed to run on gasoline, then switch to electric power after a charge has built up, which means all the benefits of the electric motor are reaped during long-distance travel.
When Earnest heard there was a new electric vehicle dealer in the area, he traded the second Prius in for a ZENN, a small battery electric vehicle designed and built in Canada – ZENN is an acronym that stands for "Zero Emissions, No Noise." The quiet little car uses no gasoline, produces no exhaust and, if the amount of electricity it uses were converted into an equivalent amount of gasoline, it would get approximately of 245 miles to the gallon. Earnest just plugs it in every night when he gets home, and has enough juice to carry him though all of his local errands.
"For what we need, it’s awesome," says Earnest.
"It’s a fun little car to drive. It’s what we drive most of the time on the island."
The limited speed capabilities of the ZENN were not an issue for Earnest, because all of Chebeague Island’s roads are posted at 30 miles per hour.
But Kal Rogers, the marketing director and sole salesman for Maine Electric Vehicles, admits the appeal of the ZENN is somewhat limited.
"Understandably, not a lot of people are clamoring for a 25 mile per hour car," says Rogers.
Part of the problem is the legal limitations placed on the owners of such vehicles. According to Maine’s 2003 low-speed vehicle legislation, cars like the ZENN are only allowed to operate on roads posted at 35 miles per hour or less, and municipalities in Maine can opt to prohibit them on specific roads, if local law enforcement determines they constitute a hazard. And Maine’s law is fairly progressive. Some states still ban low-speed vehicles outright.
So why even bother trying to sell these low-speed vehicles? Rogers says it’s mostly about public relations and education at this stage in the game.
"We’re on the cusp of introducing high-speed highway model electric cars, and we want to make ourselves visible in the meantime," notes Rogers.
Right now, Maine Electric Vehicles offers three models, the two-seat ZENN, a similar four-seat compact car produced by a California-based company called Miles Automotive and a zippy little pickup truck, also produced by Miles. Though the technology exists to allow them to run as fast as 35 miles per hour with their current engine configurations, all are capped 25 miles per hour, because that’s the maximum speed allowed by low-speed vehicle ordinances throughout the United States. The existing generation of batteries are also extremely limited in the amount of charge they can store. The ZENN, for instance, is capable of running for only about 35 miles before needing a recharge.
Rogers expects that within two years the industry will begin to release vehicles that can reach speeds of more than 80 miles per hour, and run for 120 miles or more on a single charge. Miles is currently developing its XS500 model, a fully electric highway sedan that is expected to hit the market sometime in 2009. Though the XS500’s price tag isn’t cheap – it’s expected to run about $32,000 – it’s also not so outlandishly expensive as to make it unmarketable.
But Rogers says the low-speed electric cars he’s now offering will have their uses, even after he begins to offer high-speed highway vehicles. The inexpensive electric vehicles are especially well suited to young people on limited budgets. A new low speed electric car is priced comparably to the used economy models most often sought by first-time car-buyers, and their uses are a good match for many young people’s mostly urban lifestyles.
"These smaller cars are great for getting around campus, or for people who do a lot of in-town driving. They’re perfect for people who live on Maine’s islands, but they’d work just as well for getting around downtown Portland," says Rogers.
The trick, he believes, is changing people’s mindset about how much car they actually need.
"Right now, everyone has a car that does the same thing – they’re all highway cars. Why not have cars that do different tasks within the same family. Just say, ‘OK, this is our highway car, and this one is our local car.’"
Earnest agrees.
"Neighborhood vehicles are not a part of our way of thinking, but they can be and they should be. You don’t need a highway vehicle to run your local errands."
But why drive an electric vehicle at all? Isn’t that just shifting the environmental impact from one non-renewable, pollution causing resource to another? Not necessarily, says Rogers.
"When you’re making electricity, you have options. Not all electricity comes from dirty, non renewable sources. You can get solar power, wind power, waterpower, the list goes on. But there is no such thing as green gasoline."
According to Rogers, the average car on the road today releases 19 pounds of carbon into the atmosphere for every gallon of gasoline it burns.
"It’s as though every gallon of gas you use produces a 20 pound bag of charcoal briquettes that you can see," says Rogers.
"Even if you were running a battery electric car on coal, which we all think of as dirty, it would still be cleaner than a gas car. Absolutely no pollution is produced when you actually run the car. Yes, there may be pollution in the process of creating the energy that powers it, but with gas it’s both ways; you cause pollution to produce the fuel, then more pollution to burn it."
And electricity is a source we all have at our disposal, he adds.
"The infrastructure exists. We won’t have to wait for some huge processing plant to be built for this technology to work. Unless you live in a yurt out in the woods, you already have electricity."
And it won’t overtax the resources, or force us to expand our grid, claims Rogers.
"Americans could run 180 million electric cars on the power that goes unused at night," he says.
Earnest has kept close tabs on his household’s electricity usage since he bought the ZENN, and says he hasn’t experienced a noticeable spike.
"I was actually amazed at how little it uses," says Earnest.
Rogers believes so much in the ever-expanding technology behind electric vehicles, that he envisions a day when charging stations, where drivers of electric battery powered cars can stop to charge up during longer trips, will replace gas stations.
"Right now, with the limitations we have, this isn’t the ideal solution for everyone, but it’s getting better every day."
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