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Tuesday, February 9, 2010 |
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Forget the pump; plug in instead
Published August 9, 2007
SEGUIN — A while back, Jim Smith pulled his 1989 Dodge Ram 50 pickup into Bradzoil on Texas 46 to get it inspected, just after he and his father, Clarence Smith, did a little bit of work on it.
He called Manager Monty Trost over and asked him to change the oil and filter.
The problem is, there isn’t any. There also isn’t any exhaust system, any cooling system or any fuel system — unless you want to count a bunch of batteries he keeps in a stainless steel box in the bed of the pickup. There are no belts to adjust and no hoses to break.
You just plug it in, check the water in the batteries — there are 18 of them — once a month, and count on having to replace the batteries, which weigh more than 1,100 lbs and cost $2,400, every 3-5 years.
“It’s pretty slick,” Trost said, shaking his head. “It’s kind of like a golf cart on steroids.”
That’s because Jim and his father converted the truck to run on electricity, and his wife drives it to work each day.
The truck’s maximum speed and range depend on the terrain it’s driving on. But on a flat, open highway, Jim believes — he estimates it because he said he would never speed — it will climb to a top speed of 85 mph. At 65 to 70 mph, it has a reliable and effective range of 50 miles or so.
“If you keep the speed to 50 or 55 mph, you’ll get between 50 and 80 miles on a charge,” he said. “If the terrain’s fairly flat, like driving into San Antonio, it’ll get you down there and back. I’ve logged 90 miles, but by then it’s down to the point that it’s just creeping along like a golf cart.”
The idea came when gas hit the $3 per gallon mark, Jim said. At that price, it wouldn’t take long to offset the cost of conversion, he believed.
“About a year ago when the gas prices started really going up, I decided I was going to build something my wife could take back and forth to work,” he said. “It took us nine months to build, and she’s been driving it the last three months.”
And, since Jim and Clarence first rolled it out of the garage, they haven’t had a bit of trouble with it.
And why not? The engine, after all, has only one moving part: the armature.
It has none of the gaskets, oil seals, bearings or hundreds of other parts that wear out in an internal combustion engine and cause maintenance headaches.
“It’s just like driving a regular pickup,” Sandy said. “I just don’t have to stop for gas.”
Sandy said she knew when her husband told her he and his dad were going to build her a truck that they’d get it done.
“They’ve built a lot of things together,” she said. “So I wasn’t at all surprised. But I was really surprised how well it performs. It goes 65 whenever you want to. The most difficult thing to get used to was there was no engine noise, so it took me a while to be able to be sure it was still running.”
“You also use the clutch a little differently when you drive an electric pickup, she said. You don’t need it to start or stop — the transmission functions just as though it’s an automatic, even though it’s standard — but you do need to shift up through the gears.”
The speedometer still works, but most of the gauges in the Smiths’ truck don’t. They’re replaced with three electrical gauges — one for remaining charge, one that tells how many amps the throttle is feeding the motor and one that lists the peak load.
“Those are the only three gauges you need,” Jim said. “A lot of people ask how many miles per gallon it gets. The short answer is, it doesn’t get any. It’s miles per ampere.”
“For short commutes, this truck is ideal,” Sandy said. “When you have a long trip, you use your regular vehicle.”
Insurance isn’t a problem, Jim said. Some companies even offer discounts for electric vehicles because they have safety advantages over cars that must haul around a tankful of flammable and toxic fuel.
Jim estimates his wife puts $3,000 or more into her daily driver, which is a 1964 Chevy pickup. At that rate, he said, it would take a little more than three years to pay the cost of the conversion.
But in today’s market, most vehicles are going to cost $10,000 — some much more — and you have to buy a vehicle anyway, he said.
“You have to have something to drive anyway,” he said. “It might as well be this.”
Ah, but the batteries are expensive, and that’s why an electric vehicle isn’t feasible, right?
Wrong, Jim said. A complete set of batteries costs $2,400, which figures out to about $42 a month over their projected three-year life — still half of what Jim puts in gas in his truck each week.
How difficult was it to build? Not too bad, Smith said.
But before you round up a set of screwdrivers and a bunch of batteries, you’d best consider just what he meant by “not too bad.”
First, he had some serious help in his father, who at age 83, Jim says can and has built just about anything.
“He taught me everything I know about gas engines,” Jim said. “When I told him about it, he was ready to go out and beat the oil companies. He just said, ‘Let’s do it.’”
And that’s what they did.
First, they had to pull the blown engine and its support systems — lightening the vehicle by more than 500 pounds, which was important when they stuffed those heavy batteries back into the truck.
Much of the build time, Jim said, was in rounding up the parts.
“All we did, basically, was take out the gas engine, put in an adapter, and hooked an electric motor up to the transmission,” Smith said. “It wasn’t that hard, it was just trying to find the components we needed to put it all together.”
Doing much of his own work and a lot of backyard engineering, Jim estimates he spent about $10,000, including the original price of the truck with its blown gas engine, in converting the Ram to run on electricity.
A custom kit engineered to convert a Volkswagen Rabbit or even a Porsche 914 to run on electricity will set you back about 10 grand.
Smith’s project was made a little more pricey because he found as gas prices have gone up, others have embarked on alternative energy projects, and as the parts get more and more difficult to find, the prices of the components go up. It’s the law of supply and demand, Smith said.
“There are quite a few people starting to do it, but as far as I know, I have the first electric truck in Seguin,” Jim said.
He found technical information and suppliers for the various parts through a California company, Electro Automotive.
“The gentleman there who’s helping me had been building them since 1979,” Smith said. “We built this based on their experience, and they were extremely helpful.”
One of the knocks against electric cars is the cost of the electricity it takes to keep them running.
But Smith’s truck relies on relatively cheap lead acid golf cart batteries and while he can’t say for sure because he’s also running his home air conditioning since it’s summertime, he believes a charge costs about 40 cents a day, which is less than a penny a mile, considerably less than he spent on gasoline, even in an economy model, quarter-ton pickup.
“She comes home in the evening, plugs it in, and in the morning, it’s fully charged,” Smith said. “She unplugs it and goes to work.”
Clarence Smith said he hopes others will follow the lead of him and his son.
“I don’t care whether we profit from it, I just wish people would get excited about this and build these,” he said. “It would be good for our economy and good for our country. I wish the politicians would get behind this. I’d rather see that than them sacrificing our corn for ethanol.”
Clarence is sure there are guys working in the auto industry who are resourceful enough to make it happen.
“They probably have plenty of farm boys working in those Ford factories, but they need to give them a little more say,” he said. “It’s been a dream of mine to see people grab ahold of this idea. Our country needs it.”
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