News from The San Francisco Chronicle
by Michael Taylor
It can make you dizzy, watching those numbers on the pump whiz by in such a blur that by the time you've pumped a measly 15 gallons of gasoline into your pickup truck, you've spent nearly $45.
But wait. What if you left your house in the morning, drove your 20 miles to work and 20 miles back -- by then, you'd have burned up $7 worth of gas - - and the whole trip cost a mere 50 cents?
That would be about the price of the electricity it costs to recharge your Ford Ranger electric-powered truck overnight. That's the truck that will go about 80 miles between charges, the one that looks the same as a gas- powered Ranger.
And there are other vehicles in this electric-powered class: the most original is General Motors' EV1, built from the ground up as a fast, economical two-seater, along with the Honda EV-Plus, the Ford TH!NK, Toyota RAV4 EV, Nissan Altra, Chevrolet S10 Electric and Chrysler Epic.
Pretty nifty cars, if you want to get out from under the thumb of the oil companies. There's only one problem: For the most part, you can't have them.
GM and other manufacturers have recalled most of their cars, leaving some in public agency fleets and others in museums or universities. In fact, GM has been hauling its EV1s out to the Arizona desert and crushing them.
For all intents and purposes, the hugely expensive electric car program - - created in the 1990s by the California Air Resources Board's mandate that the major automakers build a certain number of pollution-free cars -- is just about dead. The law requiring manufacturers to offer those cars for sale has long since been modified -- hybrids, compressed natural gas and 'SULEV' cars (super ultra-low-emission vehicles) have taken up the environmental slack.
The automakers, saying all-electric vehicles occupy a tiny and economically worthless niche, simply stopped making, leasing or selling the cars.
And the people who leased the cars and wound up adoring them, only to see them called back in at the end of the lease period, are livid. Many wanted to buy the autos, but all but one manufacturer said no.
Over the past few months, the electric car enthusiasts have conducted noisy protests and held round-the-clock vigils against Ford and GM in front of auto dealerships or storage yards, most of it to no avail.
David Raboy, however, was one of the lucky few -- when Ford told him he had to turn in his beloved truck because the lease was up, he conducted a well- publicized vigil in front of Senator Ford in Sacramento. Ford finally relented and sold him and other lessees their Rangers for $1 each.
Raboy and his wife, Heather Bernikoff, both 34, plug the Ranger into a charging device on their ranch in Mariposa County. It costs them pennies to recharge it each day.
And the truck is hardly a slouch. With half a ton's worth of batteries slung under the pickup bed, lowering the truck's center of gravity, it handles more like a Mustang than the workhorse it was designed to be, taking corners marked for 30 mph at more than 65. Raboy said that in the past four years, the truck 'has cost me nothing to run. No maintenance, no oil changes, no gas.'
That, of course, is the point of the electric vehicle aficionados in California, a group of several hundred people who are, without exaggeration, fervent evangelists for their cars. Many of them look at the auto industry as a tribe of idiots who will never break their reliance on the dwindling supply of fossil fuels, despite experimental forays into fuel cell technology.
'Electric vehicles are loved by the people who drove them, almost universally,' said Marc Geller, a San Francisco photographer who had a Ford TH! NK until Ford took it back, then spent $38,000 to buy a used Toyota RAV4 EV. Geller concedes that the car needs to be plugged in each night, but says that once people get used to an electric car, they love it.
The electric RAV4s, small SUVs that have their batteries under the floor, are still being sold, but only as used cars by individuals. Toyota discontinued its electric RAV4 program.
Some electric cars can still be found in public utility and city government fleets. Vacaville, for example, turned the niche craze for zero- emission, no-gas cars into public policy, largely through the efforts of the city's transportation systems manager, Ed Huestis."
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