Funny Yellow Car

Who Killed The Electric Car Opening

2006-07-12T21:52:00.000-07:00

The opening weekend of Who Killed the Electric Car was our opportunity to send EV owners to theatres all over the Bay Area to show off the cars and ask people to join us in the campaign to plug in America. I used to work at the Aquarius Theatre and my friend Tim works there now, so he directed me to the right person to help us spread the word about our EV rally. It was quite an event. We had four or five RAV 4 EVs the first night. There are more of them than any other EV, so when they show up I always feel like the reinformcement troops have arrived. Kind of like Stormtroopers if they were the good guys. The EV 1, the star of the movie, is definately our Princess Lea. Here you can see Brandy in his utilikilt, which I covet. It's part of his EV demo outfit. People remember him because of it. He wore the black one on Friday. Three of us showing our EVs here all have solar panels on our homes, so we were able to promote totally clean cars. Many EV owners do invest in solar because the savings in gas money pays for the system much sooner. Brandy said he paid for his in two and a half years.

The timing of this movie coming on the heels of An Inconvenient Truth, couldn't have been better. It's not a great movie, as Tim critically pointed out, really more of a home movie given the inexperience of the filmaker, himself a former EV1 driver, but it does tell all the details of the plot to roll back California's zero emissions mandate and get rid of production electric cars. So in that sense it is a good documentary and it gets people riled up.

I had a jolly time hanging out in the street showing off the Sparrow. Friends showed up to play. We put our "Not Dead Yet" postcards on each car. I ran into more friends coming to see Wordplay. This must be the year of the documentary.

The Raging Grannies sent word out that they would be attending the movie on Saturday, so I asked them if they could sing something and they were only too happy to oblige. They even wrote a song especially for us to the tune of Where oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone. Their other songs were about gas guzzlers sending us to war for oil. They had written these for the Jumpstart Ford campaign when we picketed local Ford dealerships.

The following weekend of Who Killed The Electric Car they decided to go to Santana Row theatres. When I told Granny Ruth that EV owners had been asked to leave the premises because they were handing out literature about the electric car, she organized a rally to protest the censorship. And dang if they didn't get themselves on the 10 o'clock news. It was sweet. The theatre didn't know what hit them and decided not to have the Grannies arrested. Technically they could have, since it was private property the Grannies were occupying. Santana Row is a mall that's made to look like a street with sidewalks, but it is not public property as legitimate streets and sidewalks are where citizens are allowed freedom of speech. Faux street, faux sidewalk, faux rights, I say.

The point the news story was making was that it was private property which was being violated by the Grannies. At the same time it was terrific coverage for the Grannies to tell the whole story and show our brochures about the electric cars. "Electric cars are available, plug-in hybrids exist," said Granny Ruth, as if the mall was trying to suppress the information. I did notice that they were not showing the movie soon after that.

Make Faire Plug-in Prius Demo

2006-04-29T08:34:00.000-07:00

The CalCars demo at the Make Faire in San Mateo, over Earth day weekend, allowed the public to watch, a team of twelve EV enthusiasts, install an extra battery pack and plug into a 2005 Prius. Only a few asked if we would void the warranty. For the computer and electronics maybe, but not for the rest of it, we told them. What the owner would sacrifice was access to the spare tire as the new batteries would sit on top of the spare tire wheel well, but the cargo space would still be the same.

What people did ask was "why wasn't Toyota doing this?" Our makeshift set-up was so obviously inferior to the resources and brains of a modern automotive factory. And with no access code, we were having to "spoof" the computer, fool it into accepting the new battery pack without shutting off the electric mode and turning on the gas engine. When I told people that Toyota didn't think the public would understand the concept or accept a plug-in option, they rolled their eyes. This was a crowd eager to jump on every new innovation.

The auto industry has many excuses, but we believe that what they fear most is that the electric motor technology would suddenly switch the entire industry over to this superior technology just as digital cameras had rendered film cameras obsolete. The combustion engine, with all its after market servicing needs, would be gone and oil profits with it. Toyota claims that battery technology is not here yet even for a plug-in hybrid, but we know that they made the RAV4 EV with a range of 100 miles using the nickel metal hydride battery (NiMh).

The battery pack being installed into our project were small lead acid batteries used in motorcycles and electric bicycles. They were cheap and available, but would only have a range of 20 miles and would add 300lbs in weight. (I spent a good part of the weekend hammering lengths of copper tubing flat and shaping them into connectors to bolt to the battery terminals, thus forming an electrical path between them.)

The lighter and better performing NiMh batteries are only sold in large lots suitable for mass production. Since an oil interest (Chevron) has a controlling stake in the company that makes them, we suspect that this is an effort to keep home mechanics from building viable electric vehicles. The new hope was in lithium ion batteries. Though expensive, these batteries, in an electric car, would boost performance beyond the combustion engine altogether. The car companies have no excuse.

What we were trying to do was show the public that the technology was here and create a demand for it. Many visitors to the booth thought we were in the business of installing the option ourselves and were annoyed when I told them this was just a demonstration and the only U.S. company able to give them the plug-in option would take 6 months to install it. For about $3,000 in parts they could do it themselves, but what we wanted them to do was go to their dealer and ask for the plug-in option, thus letting Toyota know that we had let the cat out of the bag and consumers were demanding it. Such are the visions of the grass roots activist. The team did not complete the conversion in the two days of the fair. The car was driven to another location where the core group worked on the project all day and evening Monday before it was done and the owner was able to drive his car back to Seattle.

More about the Make Faire demo here

Not Dead Yet

2006-04-21T23:01:00.000-07:00

Our EV chapter and others who had come down for the Make Faire demo convened at the screening of the documentary "Who Killed The Electric Car" which was showing at the San Francisco Film Festival. This tale, of GMs much loved EV1 being sent to the crusher despite the popularity of the car and the horrified cries of those who wanted to keep it, was a neat summary of how corporate power, in collusion with government and oil interests, squelched any innovation threatening to their hegemony. The plucky, democratic, American can-do spirit, that we are counting on to solve our planetary problems, was clearly being trampled. Audiences come away outraged and wanting to do something. The film, distributed by Sony Classics, will open on June 28th in a handful of major cities. With a bit of luck it will build on the buzz it is already getting.

We passed out the "Not Dead Yet" postcard and a book mark for Sherry Boschert's book, Plug-in Hybrids: The Cars that will Recharge America coming out near the end of the year. We also offered rides, after the movie, in the RAV 4s and Danny's Solectria and Cal Cars offered rides in their Prius Plug-Ins. We drove people to the party for the film where I got to meet Chelsea Sexton, the GM representative for the EV1 and one of the stars of the film.

Sparrow Returns

2006-02-14T11:41:00.000-08:00

The Sparrow has returned and there is much joy in our household for now we can be part of the solution again. Catherine got the first ride, since I had a client out of range that day. Then we drove it that weekend to a workshop of environmentalists and were much admired. The Sparrow really does put us on the right side of the bed as it were. Getting up in the morning, we feel much less hopless about the state of the planet when we can drive our sun-powered electric car. When it was gone so long it was as though we took a step backward, way backward. It had been nine months gone, by the time we had her back home again.

The new DCP controller puts out 900 units of power instead of the 500 that the original Kilovac controller did. So it's peppier and it also uses the battery pack more efficiently. Ed said that the Kilovac was set to put resistance on the motor for safety considerations, so without the added resistance the motor doesn't have to use up juice to keep itself in check. What took so long was that he couldn't figure out how the DCP was supposed to be wired.

Originally Ed opted to put in another Kilovac controller that had become available, but when he got it in, it wouldn't work either. It wasn't new (they don't make that model anymore) so that was a risk he took and he didn't charge me for installing it. (It took the wind out of his sails a bit, especially since he was between jobs when he took it on and then he landed a job that had him working overtime). To fit the DCP controller into my Sparrow he had to cut the steel box shorter and weld it together again. Then he was missing a bracket which he didn't find until he took a trip to another state to an EV rally and asked around. Then when the bracket was in, he couldn't get it to go into reverse or what, so there was more troubleshooting to do and the other local mechanic was booked up. Finally he got the mysterious Claire Bell to come out and wire it. She used to work for the original Corbin factory.

I was just thankful that the car can still be made to run with what parts there are out there and with what Sparrow support mechanics there are. This is not a complex technology thankfully. In fact any high school auto shop classes can take up the EV challenge and teach kids to convert old cars and trucks to EVs as 30 schools are doing now. And with the battery technology getting up to speed and all this talk about the plug-in hybrid, the return of the EV feels like it's right over the next hill there.

Just as hidden in our geography are sustainably built, solar powered buildings waiting to reveal their secrets to a willing public, so, too, will EVs become a sought after solution once our "oil addiction" is accepted for what it is: an unsustainable, planet killing, dead dinosaour technology. We took a tour of such a building on Stanford land last week. I e-mailed ahead to ask if I could plug in the Sparrow. They had golf-cart type vehicles on the site, so they knew exactly what I was talking about and we got the royal treatment when we arrived. Plus I got to give a test drive to one of my classmates and exemplify the Be The Change message of our program. Just having the Sparrow at hand in its physical reality imbues optimism everywhere we go.

Cycling Sojourn

2006-01-20T10:41:00.000-08:00

One thing the long absence of the Sparrow did for me was to get me back on my bicycle. I had been a cycling enthusiast as a teen, back when ten speeds were all the rage and gas was expensive. And I didn't ever give it up entirely, making a rule to ride on errands in town. Then I just pushed my range to the 6 miles it took to get to clients two towns over, thus discovering some of the most beautiful and quiet residential streets of Atherton, one of the priciest neighborhoods in the country. It was a mini-vacation just to ride to work.

Then a new client in the city told me there was no parking at her house, but she was near the train station, so I decided to take my Xootr scooter on the train and ride the four blocks to her townhouse. Having had a taste of being car free in the city, I wanted to try the bike there too. I had already broken the ice by leading a solar homes tour by bike for our San Francisco EV chapter fundraiser and I got a bike map out of the bargain.

For my trip into downtown during business hours I picked only the designated bike routes. What an exhilarating experience it was to be in all that downtown pedestrian and jammed up auto, tram, bus traffic. The bicycle was by far the nimblest and fastest mode of transport and there were surprising moments of quiet empty streets. I didn't feel trapped by tall buildings as I did in a car; I was liberated from seat belts, traffic jams, blind spots and I could see much more. It did feel more dangerous out of the immediate downtown, with cars being so impatient, so I read up on urban cycling survival tips and watched other city cyclists.

Few women ride the city streets. I saw just one commuter on the train, more on weekends in cycling gear. Cycling is chiefly the transport of the poor, judging from those mostly Latino men, I passed on the street. A few determined and well-outfitted guys were my peers. I discovered a whole world of them online. There are more cycling blogs than possibly any other subject after cooking and gardening. The cycling subculture was an articulate and intelligent one, full of imaginative attempts to do everything by bike including moving households. Soon, I too, was an avid cycling advocate.

Usually I would put the bike away with the shorter days, but having gone emission free all summer, I decided to break the night time barrier and just get more lights, flashers, reflective stickers and a high visibility jacket. I rode to my karate class twice a week, which gave me a warm-up before class, so why give up that edge? Riding at night turned out to be easier than I thought. Motorists did see me and give me room. After rush hour, I had the street to myself.

The last barrier was to ride in the rain. For this I had my rain suit -matching royal blue pants and a hooded jacket, contrasting with my bright red gloves. I had to laugh at the reaction of motorists when they saw me. They stopped dead in the street and waved me across even though they had no stop sign. The bigger the SUV, the more they wanted to stop. Finally I just had to cross, so they wouldn't hold up traffic. I felt like they wanted to rescue me from drowning. "Oh my god, look she's out in the rain." It wasn't even a downpour. And there's nothing like rain to heighten the experience of being outside. And that was the best part of cycling. Just being outside. And the whole body, human powered, speedy, gyroscopic rush of it all.

The eGo Cycle

2006-01-15T07:49:00.000-08:00

With the Sparrow out of commission I felt I had to have another EV type transport. With peak oil looming on the horizon, it seemed prudent rather than frivolous to have another EV in the house. Even when the Sparrow returned, I knew there would still be a place for the eGo cycle on the days when Catherine took the Sparrow to work.

After researching the various bike/motor hybrids, I decided to dispense with pedals and settle for just the electric motor, since it was half the price. Other EV members of my chapter had recommended the eGo cycle for its potential for modification to increase speed and range, so I ordered one from the Real Goods/Gaim catalog on sale for $999. The company is in Rhode Island, but, now, the scooter is made in Taiwan.

It came delivered by air frieght in about four weeks and I assembled it that afternoon which meant slipping the fully assembled fork into the body, with the locknuts in the right order and making sure all the brake cables were untangled. My biggest concern was that it make it up the various hills around my house without burning out the motor. The manual warned about going up hills that took longer than 30 seconds to climb. Hills were why I wanted the eGo Cycle because I'm not a big hill climber on my bicycle. The eGo cycle's primary purpose would be to get me to my mother's house.

(It is interesting to note that new housing developments have unreasonably steep streets simply because modern vehicles can climb those hills easily whereas in the pre-50's neighborhood, more care was taken to grade streets up hills so that other types of traffic could make it. This means that these hills are basically off limits to bicycle traffic. What about San Francisco one might well ask? Same thing, but they had cable cars in the older parts of town and then developed the rest later. Also the steep streets are shorter in San Francisco except in the Twin Peaks area.)

Luckily I have yet to climb a hill the eGo cycle couldn't make and I've been up ones that took much longer than 30 seconds to climb. There was a break-in period of four hours when I took care to stay mostly on the flats, but after that it was good to go. Soon it became my grocery runner. I put a good size deep basket on the front and had my bicycle bag on the rack in back, but then I found a really big basket I could zip tie to the rack. I've been able to carry a full size bush in it (for transplanting to my mother's garden) and I can also fit things in front of my feet right on the deck, securing it with a long bungee cord around the control post, flowers for instance or another plant.

The scooter charges up in about four hours and takes less than a kilowatt of juice, about a fifth of what the Sparrow needs. It has a range of 20 miles, but I can't imagine sitting on it for that long. The range is considerably shortened by hills, so I have used the "go far" mode to get home. In the "go far" mode, it's slower than riding a bicycle, so I nearly always have it in the "go fast" mode which gets it up to 23 mph, unless going up a hill, then it's more like 13-14 mph. Though not a head turner like the Sparrow, it gets some attention when people see it close up and realize it is electric.

Ed's Sparrow

2005-12-16T08:50:00.000-08:00

Since the Sparrow was so long out of commission sitting in Ed's garage all summer, he decided to loan me his bird shortly after Thanksgiving. This gave me a chance to see what his Zilla controller was like. The Zilla is air-cooled and quieter than what I was used to. It's also a good bit more powerful, overkill really and I did not try to put it through its paces at high speeds. I was already nervous driving someone else's vehicle, but I could feel its power just on acceleration. The Zilla was Ed's upgrade. His original controller was a DCP.

The first Sparrows were smaller, what are referred to as the Jelly Bean model and have a window in the back. There's a platform behind the seat and a pocket for the cord. One Sparrow owner could fit her dog in that space, but it had to have been no bigger than a terrier. Ed added brackets to suspend a briefcase above the platform. He also installed a four-point harness, which means that if you put anything on the back platform it will hang up the harness. His door didn't open from the inside, anymore, due to the warping of the fiberglass parts. I think the tight shape of the Jelly Bean allowed less leeway for the door fitting. To get out you have to roll the window down. Then one night I couldn't get the door open from the outside and had to climb through the little hatch in the rear to reach for the door handle. Ed told me the trick later, which is to press on the door as I was opening it.

In a way it was more frustrating to have his Sparrow than not to have mine back, particularly because I couldn't fit much more than my lunch, but I did get to drive emission free for a number of my trips.

Ed's Sparrow does have some sophisticated battery reading instruments in it. He has a meter on the dash with a graphic reading of each battery as it uses up its charge. This was his own modification along with the box we all got installed that allows you to test each battery without actually having to touch them.

Interestingly enough, his bird didn't get nearly the reaction from people as my yellow friend does, though they were still intrigued and the "powered by American electrons" bumper stickers delivered more of a message. The Jelly Bean model looks like a more serious car, while mine just looks plain ridiculous - an oversize kids toy, a giant banana, a clown car. Domino's Pizza is responsible for the shape of my car. They asked Corbin to make them a model they could use for delivering pizzas, thus the pizza butt was born and I am forever grateful for that relatively voluminous trunk space. I also missed the clown car aspect of driving around my yella friend. I'm just a clown at heart, I guess.

Xebra and Obvio at SF Auto Show

2005-11-26T15:31:00.000-08:00

Xebra

Suddenly we have an affordable electric car on the scene. For just under $9,000, the Xebra claimed to carry four people and get up to 40 mph with a 40-mile range. Could it be true? I had to see for myself. Zapworld, the Santa Rosa electric scooter company made the paper with its display of the new electric Xebra at the San Francisco International auto show this week.

Like the Sparrow it has three wheels and registers as a motorcycle. I asked how many batteries it had. Six, said the sales rep, but didn't offer to show me the car. The doors were locked so couldn't even get in the car. In fact, after talking to my EV buddy Mark Geller, I agreed with him that the cars weren't real. The body panels looked like painted over plaster of Paris.

The sales person gave me a card to register for a test drive and disappeared before I could ask any more questions. They're not offering a test drive until January and only in certain obscure cities. We think that they're generating publicity for the car in order to lure investors. This is their pattern, but they haven't managed to come through with an actual product yet, just scooters. They've been struggling to get the Smart car imported for two years now. The sales person said that the EPA was holding it up which means that it doesn't meet emission standards. I had heard that it didn't meet crash test standards.

Obvio trybrid car

The more interesting car was the Obvio. With its wing doors and wild color scheme, it was eliciting more interest than the Xebra. This was not a working vehicle either. Zap claims to be working with a Brazilian company to bring this car to market. It is a trybrid; able to run on gas, alcohol or electric, but the sales person, a different one, couldn't tell me whether all three systems would exist in one car. An interesting feature was the front seat, which can accommodate three people in a row. Perfect for the ménage a trois. Another whimsical feature was that a Boblbee backpack is supposed to snap onto the dashboard. They had the backpacks on the rear window deck, but I didn't see how they attached to the dashboard.

Plugging the Plug-In

With electric vehicles struggling to find investors, the EV community feels that the plug-in hybrid will be the technology that brings back the electric car because once people realize how easy it is to plug in and how little they actually use the gas engine in the hybrid, they may simply opt for an electric car for their around town runabout.

Triple A allowed our CalCars team to show the plug-in Prius to the public. They had a display titled "Alternatives that Empower" and "Could Your Choice of Car Change the World?" The alternatives were natural gas, hybrids and hydrogen. To their credit they did explain that the making of hydrogen causes more emissions than if you were to use fossil fuels directly.

Sierra Summit Showdown

2005-09-17T07:49:00.000-07:00

The Sierra Summit, also called The Sierra Club's National Environmental Convention & Expo, was held at the Moscone Center last weekend. Sherry Boschert, president of the San Francisco chapter of the Electric Vehicle Association, found out early on that there would be car manufactures represented and that they would be giving test-drives in their latest hybrids and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (plus one natural gas car). Naturally we felt that the public should also be educated about even better alternatives such as the Prius Plus and the all-electric car so we signed up for booth space and requested that we also be allowed to offer the public rides in our cars.

Somehow this request never quite made it into the program. At first they said yes, then they couldn't remember, then it was too late to include us and basically they thought we would just forget about it. Did they not know whom they were dealing with? That this was the team that coordinated with activists in Norway to publicize the impending intentions of Ford to crush the much loved all-electric Th!nk City car? And that, with the help of Greenpeace, they succeeded? Did they not know that our Vice President Marc Geller was one of the founders of DontCrush.com, a group created to save, among others, the Toyota RAV 4 all-electric car and it was indeed saved? Did they not know that we also have, as an ally, Felix Kramer, founder of CalCars.org, who has dedicated many hours to promoting the Prius Plus, a car engineered by Ron Gremban to carry an extra battery pack, drive all-electric at sub-freeway speeds, and thus up the mileage to 100 mpg.

As Margaret Meed said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." And it is in the arena of this David and Goliath fight with automakers, that I have found this much-lauded sentiment to actually hold true.

Perhaps what it comes down to is money. Non-profit organizations need money to carry out the good that they do. And this money comes largely from corporations. It is the unwritten rule that, in taking such money, the corporations are to be made, shall we say, comfortable within the culture of said organization and perhaps be allowed to exploit the situation.

It still cost the car dealers $3,000 for each car they brought to give test-drives to the public, plus $800 for a booth for each dealer. This was supposed to be the barrier to our entry into the game because as a non-profit we couldn't afford that. The Sierra club paid $63,000 to Green Car Journal to organize, hire staff and run the test drive event. The car dealers then held a press conference in conjunction with publicity being generated for the Sierra Summit.

Details of this cohabitation between a leading environmental organization and makers of the much maligned planet killing SUVs was duly reported in the Chronicle with much free publicity given to the features of the new cars. The writer lauded this union as a demonstration of how environmentalists were finally getting their needs met by technology. Hah we say. Though the Prius raised the bar to 60 mpg, all the hybrids that followed are far short of reaching that standard. In our view, the Prius had merely set a baseline to which others should aspire to exceed.

We would continue to educate the public whether or not the Sierra Club gave us a fair and equitable place to do it in. The manufacturers' cars were parked just outside the doors to the convention center, but we were not allowed to park there even though it was plenty large enough to accommodate everyone . So we got a police permit for the two closest parking meters - half a block away. Then we positioned ourselves on the public sidewalk beyond the automakers' gasoline and hydrogen fueled vehicles, armed with walkie talkies to call our electric cars whenever a Sierra Club member was interested in taking a ride. As the Sierra Club no doubt desired, we were out of sight. That is until Sherry got out a bullhorn borrowed from our friends at Rainforest Action Network.

She was asked not to mention the Sierra Club in her announcement so she didn't. Then she was asked not to mention the word "automakers" so she dropped that. And still they weren't happy because, after all, we were offering an alternative to everything the car dealers represented - a gas car.

"Hello Sierra Club members. If you would like to ride in a plug-in hybrid that gets 100 miles per gallon or an electric car that doesn't use gas at all, walk past those gas cars and we will put you in a car that is all electric. It doesn't even have a tailpipe."

I took my turn holding up our sign announcing the plug-in cars. Automakers have a conniption fit when we say "plug-in" cars because they have spent so much money trying to teach the public that they don't have to plug in their hybrid cars and shouldn't ever want to. It's just, you know, so dorky, like having training wheels. Having a plug implies that the hybrid technology doesn't work because it does not mimic the plug free standard of the status quo.

Insiders suspect that Toyota is actually developing a plug-in hybrid, but is keeping it under wraps until gasoline prices are astronomical and the public is screaming for phenomenal gas mileage. Then instead of looking dorky holding a plug, they can be innovative. Imagine having the option of tapping into your household electricity for pennies per mile; you might go for months without actually having to buy gas. What an amazing new technology.

We are blowing it for them. We have added the plug-in option in our own garages already. We want the option now, but the public is still in the dark. Who will lead them to the new technology? When gas is $10 a gallon? And what of the old technology of all-electric cars? We made them stop crushing those cars as if they were just a bad dream. Can we make them give us electric cars again?

Those who took us up on our offer of a free ride were very enthusiastic about the all-electric car. Marc in his Toyota RAV 4 electric car enthusiastically expounded on the virtues of his ride. The quiet take-off alone is a charmer. And with a range of 120 miles, that's still plenty enough for most commutes.

Early on we were asked by the Sierra Club event managers not to bring the cars into the Convention Center even though anybody else could still drive in to drop off passengers. We then picked up passengers at the sidewalk. They could not do anything about Sherry and her bullhorn because as a citizen standing on the sidewalk on public property, she was within her rights.

Still miffed at our stealing the limelight from the "real" cars, they called a cop to report us for a traffic violation. He came over to tell us that stopping at that particular spot in traffic was illegal, which it was, so we simply moved to another location.

Many people visited our booth. "PV + EV" said the banner over our booth, for we were also promoting a solar homes tour which will take place later in the month. The turquoise Sparrow parked in it was an eye catcher. It belonged to my mechanic. (He assures me that my Sparrow will return soon, since he's found the part. Yay!) People were very curious about the Sparrow and while they were there, we told them about the Prius Plus. One of the Lincoln Mercury guys, who works on their hybrids, came by our booth, too, and was very interested in the technology. We also got 90 signatures on our petition to the automakers to offer a plug-in option.

As they say, half the battle is just showing up. And that we did despite the Sierra Clubs ambiguous welcome.

Electric Bike Test Drive

2005-08-18T10:48:00.000-07:00

My Sparrow languishes in Ed's garage waiting on parts that maybe are no longer being made, but we can't reach the company that makes the controllers because they are in some sort of transition. This is the problem with driving a car for which there is no company to call for support. If no part can be found, I'm hoping we can manufacture the needed part like the Cubans do for their classic 50's cars.

Owning a Sparrow definitely means having back-up wheels. One of the alternative vehicles I looked at was Mike Skeeter's recumbent bicycle with ad-on motor. Mike has been working on this project for ten years in his garage in Palo Alto. He himself uses the various prototype bikes for almost all his transportation needs. When I met him, he and his girlfriend were both riding on the bike. She was sitting in his lap. They had just spent the day riding to the coast, which means a long climb over the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Mike told me that his transportation concept was based on caloric intake vs. weight of vehicle to be moved. Basically he meant that we should really be measuring our transportation needs in terms of how much fuel it takes to transport ourselves in our vehicles rather than how much horse power we can access while moving. Do we want to be a bird or a dinosaur?

What I really wanted to know was what it was like to ride one of his bikes, so I dropped by his garage for a test drive. He outfitted me with a bike with one motor. His ride had two, but was heavier (100lb). I had no problem getting the hang of it and we headed for the nearest hill. The bike made it up Page Mill at a moderate 15 mph. After a half hour or so of travel, the motor quit on me. This is the problem with his one-motor bikes, he told me. They overheat and quit.

So we biked back (I pedaled) to the garage and I got on a bike with two motors. The idea was to switch between motors so they don't overheat. This was fine, but the heavier bike made it harder to maneuver when it was stationary. This raised the issue of safety. Hanging out on the road, especially the expressways we were traveling on in the bike lane, made me nervous. More so than when I rode a motorcycle (back in my bad ass, black leather days). At least on a motorcycle you can keep up with traffic and ride in the car lanes.

While I loved the concept of a recumbent bike with electric power, I felt too vulnerable on the road, more so than on a regular bicycle. Mike explained to me that recumbent bicycles were outlawed from competitive bicycle races precisely because they gave the rider so much more power. It was considered an unfair advantage! It was also argued that if recumbent bicycles were allowed in competitions the race would be more about the technology of the vehicle than the prowess of the rider. Maybe so. But on the street, a regular bicycle definitely has an advantage over the recumbent in that you can look at motorists from on high and this, I felt, was a psychological advantage. I much preferred to stare down at drivers to make sure they were going to give me the right of way.

The other issue about riding a motorized bicycle was that it was fine to be under the power of the motor, but when I had to pedal, I felt let down. Then when I was pedaling I wanted to keep pedaling for the exercise. I could probably get used to this, but it made me realize that having both was mostly cool in theory (because you're never out of power) and not as much fun in practice. Plus having both pedals and a motor made these vehicles more expensive. Mike wanted $5,000 for one of his. Another maker, Giant bicycles, also makes a semi-recumbent with a lithium battery for $2,200 and it was a finished vehicle. Mike's strapped together contraptions were not and I did not have the heart to point that out.

In the end I ordered an eGo Cycle for just over $1,000. This would give me the mobility of a motorized bicycle which could take hills and still be light enough to take on the BART and maybe even on the train. I would still have to live within its limited range of under 20 miles, but I wouldn't want to ride what was basically a moped for much further than that.

Romancing the Hydrogen Highway

2005-06-27T12:01:00.000-07:00

Click to enlarge

While the Sparrow was down I decided to study up on the Hydrogen economy. Hydrogen is a very leaky gas. I know this because every time I tried to learn about the hydrogen economy, the facts immediately leaked out of my head. It was such a complicated subject with so many different contigencies that I realized nobody is really going to understand what's at stake especially since the information put before the public was largely in favor of the Hydrogen Highway being proposed by Schwarzeneggar. Bush is also in support of the hydrogen economy as the answer to our problems with global warming and oil depletion, but the hydrogen economy is just not viable as a clean transportation solution unless there is lots of extra electricity produced from renewable energy sources to make hydrogen, as there is in Iceland.

It took 6 weeks to read up on the subject (taking notes to retain the information) and the better part of a day to write this piece, but it was worth it. The piece got a lot of attention. I received some 30 letters mostly encouraging and many offering their own ideas, with only 1 arguing in favor of the hydrogen highway and 1 not in support of the electric car as a solution because of his own experiences with the short range. The two letters to the editor that were printed were very supportive. I even got a letter from Joseph Romm himself saying "great article". (He wrote the book I referenced).

The article can be read online. There is a misprint. It should be 10,000 gallons not 1,000 gallons to fuel 800 cars.

Sparrow Down!

2005-05-30T11:51:00.000-07:00

It was the belt drive that went. I heard the thunk and the man in the pick-up truck next to me was looking at the rear of the Sparrow and then at me. I was in the far left lane of El Camino, the main road through town.

"I'm down," I said and he slowed to half my speed so I could pass in front of him. So thoughtful. The right lane was empty and I was able to cross it and swoop into a side street on what remaining momentum I had. It was raining and my window was down a few inches for air, but rain was coming in. There was no power to the windows. No power at all. Uh oh. A broken belt was not a serious thing, but no power was more ominous.

"I need a flatbed truck," I told the dispatcher at AAA. A Sparrow cannot be towed. No bumper. A burly, tattooed, tow-truck guy showed up with a flatbed that could fit a Cadillac. He had seen a Sparrow before, but not towed one. "It looks like a banana," he said. It didn't take him long to figure it out and soon he was winching the bird onto the flatbed. It sat right in the middle like a cartoon celebrity on a parade float.

"So where do we go?" he asked, "who works on these?"

"He makes house calls," I said, as I tried to think where to go. Our driveway has a 30° incline. My tow man and I agreed that it would be hard to push 1500lbs of car up an inclined driveway from a road that was also on a hill. I decided to go to my Dad's house, (my stepmother's house now). It wasn't far and it was flat with lots of space. My stepmother wasn't home and her large Volvo was parked smack in the middle of the two-car garage. I couldn't reach her. Turns out she was in Italy on holiday. I measured the space on either side. There was just room to squeeze the Sparrow in with barely inches to spare.

Sparrow Doctor

Ed my Sparrow doctor had already come to my house to bleed the brakes and fix the rear brake light. He promised to come that weekend. (He has another job - not much call for Sparrow doctoring). As I suspected, it was more than just the belt. There still was no power to the motor. And it wasn't just a fuse, it was the controller, a major component. Luckily, Ed had one in stock so we wouldn't be waiting on parts. It would be expensive though and take a while as Ed worked on it at home in his spare time. I let him take the Sparrow away on his little flatbed trailer.

Without the Sparrow coming home to roost, it was as though the sun had gone behind a cloud. Both Catherine and I had come to think of the little car as a pet living in the house with us - a mascot to our eco-sensibilities. We had been local ambassadors to an alternative paradigm garnering attention everywhere we went. Without it, our lives were dull, lackluster and ordinary. We were polluters again.

Fuel Cell Car Letter to the Merc

2005-05-28T11:45:00.000-07:00

Click to enlarge.

The San Francisco chapter of the electric vehicle association decided not to support the hydrogen highway plan being promoted by Schwarzenegger because the electricity needed to make hydrogen from water would be four times what would be needed to power an electric car the same distance down the road. We also didn't trust that automakers would be able to produce a fuel cell car anytime soon and see their support of the hydrogen highway as a boondoggle. When the San Jose Mercury did a cover story on May 23rd, they did not really explain how inefficient hydrogen production is and there was no mention of the dangers of hydrogen. We wrote letters. Two were printed on May 28th including mine. I said hydrogen was 12 times more likely to ignite than gasoline, but actually it's 20 times. I was rushing.

Peak oil letter to the Chron

2005-04-25T22:30:00.000-07:00

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When I wrote my post-petroleum piece I watched my local paper (the San Francisco Chronicle) waiting to see if they would cover peak oil. The phrase appeared in a business section headline speculating that Chevron was betting on peak oil to increase its profits. Peak oil itself was considered a controversial concept said the writer. I'd heard that before with global warming and popped off a letter to the editor just to let them know readers weren't fooled. They printed it verbatim.

Excerpted from The Resistance

Sparrow Wows Granny Queen

2005-04-03T18:26:00.000-07:00

Sparrow and I were able to attend the Fossil Fuels Day rally with the Raging Grannies and the Radical Cheerleaders from Stanford. Notice of the action had been posted to one of my meditation group boards and it was forwarded to me just in time. Global Exchange was promoting the international action which was set to target 200 Ford dealerships. The group I joined was staking out the Ford dealership in Palo Alto. Since I wasn't in the loop, I didn't really know how to participate, but I soon saw the parade of Prius's, Insights and two Ford Model Ts. I was able to pull in near the end. Sparrow was a big hit with the ladies. There was one press photographer there. The dealers seemed to take it all in good humor and one older gentleman invited some of the Grannes into the showroom. He appeared to be friends with one of the gals and they all chatted amiably. The Model Ts had signs that said they get 20 MPG, better than Ford's average fleet mileage today of 18.8! That's progress for you.

More photos at Tian Harter's site.

Why Automakers Don't Want Electric Cars

2005-03-27T06:52:00.000-08:00

They giveth and they taketh Away

Electric cars have been around since the automobile was first invented. Women especially preferred the electric automobile because the engine didn't need to be cranked over to start it and it was quiet, thus allowing one to engage in polite conversation and have tea. Yes, tea parties on board open carriages while cruising leisurely around town.

The combustion engine, meanwhile, was considered dangerous, noisy and generally unpleasant. Two technologies advanced the appeal of the combustion engine. The electric starter that was borrowed from the EV and installed in the internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles did away with the need to stand in front of the car and hand crank the engine to start it. Then the invention of the radiator eliminated the need for the driver to stop at a horse trough every few miles and douse the overheated engine with water. Meanwhile the electric car was too heavy to be supported by unpaved roads. And while gasoline could be more easily transported, stored and provided for the ICE car, electricity was not yet available in rural areas.

But what really gave the ICE technology its biggest boost was cheap fossil fuels. The oil fields of Texas and their oil barons, who were buying political power with their wealth, naturally supported every government subsidy that would further the popularity of the combustion engine, while fighting all those that would cut into their profits, particularly attempts to raise mileage standards, implement safety measures and improve tailpipe emissions. What was good for Detroit turned out to be a socialized health care system for automobiles while, ironically, creating a substantial health problem for humans. Insurance companies helped with the battle for safety belts and airbags, but the states were left to battle for clean air.

In 1998 every major carmaker had come out with an electric car to meet the requirements of three states that had passed zero emissions vehicle standards. They were well designed efficient vehicles especially the GM EV1, but the car makers did very little to interest the public in EVs setting up disincentives to keep people from driving the cars. Nobody was allowed to buy one, only lease the few hundred that were made. And those who were willing to lease had to install specialized equipment to charge the car. Automakers, backed by a sympathetic White House were able to argue that even though they could make them, the public was not interested and would not buy electric vehicles. For the states to force ZEV standards on automakers would be a severe and unnecessary hardship for the industry. GM recalled every single one of the GM EV1s at the end of the lease to be sent to the crusher. Their drivers staged public funerals for their cars. Some said it was the best car they had ever owned. Toyota did allow drivers to buy the RAV 4 EV and then stopped making them.

So why wouldn't a car company like Ford, GM or Toyota want to sell an electric car? It reminds me of the Dyson vacuum cleaner story. James Dyson, a British inventor, originally tried to sell his superior bagless vacuum cleaner technology to Hoover. They said no, nothing would replace vacuum bags. So he spent the next five years setting up his own vacuum factory. Once Dyson had won awards in Japan and became the best selling vacuum cleaner in England, Hoover regretted the decision not because they could have enjoyed sales of his vacuum, but because they could have prevented the vacuum from selling at all. Vacuum bag sales, you see, were a $500 million dollar a year industry. Just try to find a vacuum today that has a bag. The Dyson changed the industry in a year.

Oil and auto lobbyists successfully gutted the California zero emissions vehicle mandate, which would have required that 2% of the new cars sold in 2003 be EVs, then going up to 12% in 2010. Ford was happy to make electric mail vans for the post office, but when the battery company decided to discontinue the battery engineers had specified for this vehicle, Ford would not step up to the plate and order enough batteries to keep the mailvans running (or re-engineer the battery specs). Thus the vans and some 80 charging stations, all paid for by taxpayer money, were mothballed after only a year. Ford also withdrew its electric Ranger pick-up from the public. Recently Ford was going to destroy 400 Norwegian made Think cars. (Ford had bought the Norwegian company in anticipation of the California ZEV mandate before it was safely rolled back.) Because of international grassroots protests and a nation of outraged Norwegians, for whom this, the only Norwegian car produced was a national treasure, Ford decided to send the cars back to Norway with a note saying that though Europeans had embraced the electric car, Americans were not ready for EVs.

The most common EVs for sale in the U.S. today are the golf cart kind called NEVs, Neighborhood Electric Vehicles. They are not allowed by law to go over 25 mph, thus they serve to continue the myth that EVs are not capable of more than that. With the advent of the lithium battery, these fabled limitations are no longer true. The Monaco based automaker, Venturi, has come out with the first production electric sports car. It is capable of an impressive 300 mile/ per charge range and 245 horsepower, but at half a million dollars the very sexy Fetish would safely keep the car out of most people's reach.

Meanwhile EV-angelists continued to put pressure on automakers. A vigil at a Ford dealership in Sacramento in January '05 for two owners of a Ford Ranger EV pick-up garnered lots of support from fellow EV drivers and the press. Ford finally caved, allowing those who had leased the pick-up to be able to buy their leased cars for a dollar. Meanwhile GM EV1 advocates hope to do the same in Burbank for the 78 EV1s not yet crushed offering full price for every one of the now 6 year old cars.

And still automakers dig in their heels. With the Kyoto Protocol having been rejected by our oil friendly administration, states and municipalities have taken steps to cut back on green house gases. California has again set a mandate for cleaner cars by requiring that automakers curb tailpipe emissions of green house gases. This time it isn't just Ford and GM that are suing the state, but nearly every major automaker has banned together for the fight. If there is one battle at this time that will further the cause of those concerned with global warming this would be it.

UPDATE: 5/7/05 Activists were not able to save the GM EV1 as the cars were moved to another GM property where they were presumably crushed. Efforts are now being directed at Toyota to keep them from crushing the RAV 4. Marc Geller, a member of the San Francisco chapter of the Electric Vehicle Association put up a website for the Don't Crush Campaign. Don't Crush bumber stickers were handed out at the June meeting.

Letter to NRDC

2005-03-26T09:08:00.000-08:00

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I had a letter published in the National Resource Defense Council's quarterly magazine "On Earth". I wanted to point out that their report on the auto industry "Detroit is Still Stuck in Reverse", which had a historical overview of the industry, failed to give even one mention of the whole electric car episode in our automotive history. There was a second letter following mine about how they failed to mention that diesel cars can run on biofuels. We are very dedicated letter writers, we alternative transportation people. The vigil to stop GM from crushing their EV1 cars still rages on. Its the David and Goliath battle of the month, but hey, we won with Ford; they offered up their electric pick-ups to the leasers for a dollar. Go team.

Inauguration rally

2005-03-03T19:01:00.000-08:00

At the last peace rally I attended the night of the inauguration, a man with a gentle face and a ponytail came up to me and asked if he could recite a speech he had written. "Sure," I said. The recitation listed statistics about the impact of oil and automobiles, facts I already knew. "Do you like my car?" I asked him and swept my hand Vanna style behind me where my little car was parked at the curb. His delight broke his solemn decorum. "You have a Sparrow," he said, "I love Sparrows." I showed him the banner I had painted that afternoon to drape over the body. "No blood for oil. Plug into clean energy." For a dollar he sold me a tiny bumper sticker that said, "Mend your fuelish ways." He was taking pictures. I had many conversations that evening about the car.

Excerpted from The Work of Earthworms

Prius Plus

2005-02-02T20:47:00.000-08:00

I attended the San Francisco chapter meeting of the Electric Vehicle Association for a talk and demo of the Prius plus. This is a project being promoted by the California Cars Initiative in the hopes of persuading Toyota to add an extra battery pack option to their stock Prius that can then be plugged in for additional juice to the electric motor. This would allow driving around town in electric only "stealth mode" if driving 30 miles per hour or less on flat terrain.
We took a spin around the block using only the electric motor. Then when we were climbing a really steep hill the gas engine kicked in, but if we were in the flats we could have gone about 10 miles before running out of juice (at which point the gas engine would take over again). Ron Gremban, the engineer on the project, explained how he bypassed the car's computer in order to have it work in electric only mode. There is an unmarked button on the dashboard that is for the purpose of using eletric only mode. It is not activated on cars sold in the U.S. but it is in Japan and elsewhere.

He showed us the 18 electric bicycle batteries that make up the extra battery pack in his Prius. They were connected with pieces of copper tubing that had been flattened and bent to fit. The whole pack fits nicely in the storage space area of the Prius. I'm not sure how you get the spare tire out though. Felix Kramer in the picture on the left is the founder of the California Cars Initiative.

Sparrow Makes Friends

2005-01-24T06:56:00.000-08:00

Curiosity about driving a tiny electric car follows me everywhere I take my canary yellow Corbin Sparrow.

On my way to a business holiday party a teenager in an SUV pulls up to a stoplight alongside me and rolls down his window so I roll down mine. "What is it?" he asks amazed, his eyes roving rapidly over the body of the car. I tell him it's an electric Corbin Sparrow. "That is so cool. I want one," he says as his girlfriend looks on smiling and I imagine him getting down from his SUV throne and tucking his tall frame into the little bird. I tell him how to Google it and he asks me if I've seen the Austin Power's movie Goldmember. Now I'm excited because we have a point of reference. In Goldmember the bad guy makes his getaway in a one-person car. It has a huge tail pointing upward and the fenders on the car are enormous and bulbous giving it the profile of an erect phallus. There are other Sparrows in the chase scene too, that are not so absurdly modified.

"Yes it's the same one," I shout over and he offers to do his imitation of one of the characters in the movie and just as he gets into it, the light changes and off we go.

People talk to me in the car on a daily basis, or wave, or give me the thumbs up. Nearly always I get a big smile. Teenagers standing on the sidewalk burst into spontaneous laughter and point. The week the Sparrow was delivered we met our neighbors as if we were, well, neighbors. As the lesbians on the block we are not generally a part of the neighborhood chatter; only a few make a point of saying "hi". On this day even the standoffish talked to us as and joked about getting a Sparrow for their teenage daughter so she couldn't neck with her boyfriend in it. Another family stood in a row at their window watching as I test-drove it. "Yeah, but it only fits one person, " said one.

My partner Catherine and I can squeeze into it for short trips. I sit in her lap and drive with my knees pressed to the dashboard. We drove down to the Christmas tree lot and had a small tree strapped to the roof just for the fun of seeing people's reactions when we drove it home.

Driving the Sparrow was definitely a form of street theater and inspires costumes. For the holiday party I dug up my bright yellow party outfit with the green brocade trim. The yellow just matched the hue of the Sparrow and when a colleague photographed me with the car, it became the photo I sent to my relatives in Thailand. They did not comment. I'm sure they didn't know what to make of it. I was either crazy as usual or I was onto some hot new American trend and they would be left behind. My cousin wrote me shortly afterwards that she had just gotten a Sony Vario. Only one friend in Thailand, a chemistry professor, was enthusiastic. She well knew how dangerous the level of air pollution in Bangkok had become. A normal day in that city is ten times worse than a smog alert day in LA. The average life span of a tollbooth worker was 35 years old. They wear those white cloth masks which do nothing. Meanwhile rich people live in air con houses and shop in climate controlled buildings that filter the air.

My organizing colleagues were particularly curious about the car because I was using it for the work that we all did. "Well it wouldn't fit my table," said one as I showed them the trunk. "It wouldn't fit my garbage can," said another. The garbage can, I knew, was this colleague's signature. Her clients saw that she meant business when she brought her full size garbage can into their office. And the table, well that was used for sorting in a home where there were no surfaces yet cleared. I, too, had filled my station wagon to the brim for clients who were throwing stuff out and have often worked on the floor for lack of clear space, but my clients tended to need ongoing help with the paper they had, not a big purge. The Sparrow was big enough to fit my usual tool bag, drill, hardware box and office supplies. Sometimes it was a tight fit, but I just planned better, taking only what I needed.

In fact better planning was exactly what I needed in my life. I had so often driven off into my day only to realize four blocks down the road that I had forgotten some essential and had to return home. With the Sparrow I couldn't afford such errors because every wrong turn would cut into my overall range. I drive the freeway less because it is an extra four miles to get on and off the freeway from my house. Surprisingly driving the secondary roads didn't slow me down that much. And I began to feel more connected with the communities I was passing through, what with the slower pace and the people waving at me. A Sparrow day was a happy day. I drive the Sparrow most of the week and my 33-mpg Honda wagon on long trips about 6 times a month. Between the two I get better mileage than a hybrid and Catherine does well too since she drives the Sparrow when I'm not and takes the train when she can.

My clients are happy to support me driving an emission free car. They let me plug it in when I arrive. I have come to understand what is meant by infrastructure. The reason we are so tied to the combustion engine and its gas guzzling ways is because, we are told, there is no infrastructure to support an alternative transportation technology. I was proving that the infrastructure already existed. Laptop users and cell phone users in need of a charge already know this. They just stop at the local coffee shop to hang out and juice up. The coffee shop owners like it. It makes the place look busy; people buy their coffee at the same time and it is easy to add more outlets. If people are stopping in coffee shops to plug in their iPod, no reason why I can't drag in an extension cord and plug in my goPod. I'd be happy to pay double the 25 cents it would cost. And if Starbucks really wants to be cool, they can add solar panels and design their buildings to face the sun like the old Ben Franks hotdog chain did. (All those solar panels are gone now, but the silly building still remains.)

While the automakers continue to claim that there is no demand for cleaner cars let alone electric ones, Prius owners are proving them wrong. Prius owners are teaching their friends that the electric part of their hybrid car is really cool and nothing to be afraid of. It's so quiet; it's so easy and the more it kicks in, the less gasoline is used and the less pollution. There is also a group of Prius owners (www.priusplus.org) who have added more batteries to their car, thus allowing it to drive exclusively on the electric motor at 35 mph and they can plug it in for more juice.

Plugging in the car is still a little too much for most people to wrap their mind around. Probably because of all the stuff in their garage (and of course some don't have garages). A few EV owners have installed outlet boxes at the curb and invite fellow EV drivers to plug in on their travel. Now that I plug in my car at home, I find it more convenient than stopping at the gas station and more pleasant too.

Our American automakers and our President are touting the fuel cell car as the technology of the future because it runs emission free on hydrogen. Environmentalists have already pointed out the flaws of hydrogen. It's a "leaky" gas so hard to contain, takes energy to make, costs 2 to 3 times as much and will very likely be made from methanol or gasoline not renewables. Pretty sneaky way of getting the public to continue to use oil not to mention the 1.7 billion in our tax money to figure out how to do it. Splitting hydrogen off from hydrocarbons leaves us with, duh! carbons, adding to our global warming troubles. (At latest report, global warming has nearly reached the point of no return having accelerated considerably while we were arguing about whether it exists or not).

And while automakers have successfully ridiculed the electric car as being the 8 track of vehicle technology, they never mention that the fuel cell car also uses an electric motor. Yes, that's right it is nothing but an electric car with a box behind it with a chemistry lab inside it producing electrolytes on the go rather than just storing it like a battery. Getting the hydrogen in the car is the tricky part so we might just end up pumping in gasoline that would then be made into hydrogen inside the fuel cell. And because all this takes up room you would still have to fuel up every 125 miles which is about the range of the electric car that Toyota and GM put out in 1998 so why not use the electric car now? It will be a while before the engineers work this whole fuel cell thing out, decades perhaps. The better to allow automakers to continue to sell their combustion engine and spend their time suing California's latest clean air regulation. (This innovative law is the first to curb tailpipe emissions related to global warming. I sincerely hope it stays on the books this time).

Meanwhile the sale of electric scooters is climbing rapidly. Called PEVs (personal electric vehicles) these inexpensive transports include motor assisted bicycles, motorcycles, mopeds, push scooters and the Segway I saw in my neighborhood yesterday. The paradigm is shifting; people want to get out of their earth fouling behemoth cars. Judging from the way some SUV drivers react when they see my little car, I know they know their days of being cool are over. It's getting harder to justify one person driving a vehicle that is the equivalent of having their living room bolted to a truck chassis. These guilty drivers turn away from me in my Sparrow or give me disparaging looks because the contrast between us is so striking; my appearance beside them just screams out "excess", "road hog", "resource gobbling pig" as clearly as if I had held up a sign. I just smile and speed away quietly leaving them fuming, so to speak.

Flight of the Sparrow

2004-12-03T06:54:00.000-08:00

Who would have thought that a car would be the answer to my post election funk? Hey, if you can't beat them go shopping! Besides a sporty little car would be a fitting right of passage to the traditional mid-life crisis.

The car I had my eye on was the California built Corbin Sparrow which made its debut in the heady, millionaire-born-every-day, dot com era. When I read about the Sparrow in Wired magazine back in '00, I saw it as another innovative gadget, an expensive toy for people who had no more to carry than a briefcase. The appeal to me was that it was electric, a true zero emissions car.

The first time I saw an electric car was in 1990 in Ukiah where they were having an electric car rally as a parallel event with the early Solar Festival put on by Real Goods. The cars were all parked when I arrived, but then one pulled out, a skinny little red racing car. It was so quiet as it glided by it appeared to be bewitched. I was awestruck. How could one not be slayed by this magical vehicle?

The electric motor is so simple, it doesn't need a tune-up of any sort, just a replacement of brushes every 2-3 years. And it lasts 3-5 times longer than a combustion engine. If most cars were electric all those car dealerships would be sitting idle like the Maytag washer repairmen and all the support industries that put Humpty Dumpty on the road everyday would be seriously impacted. No wonder the automakers didn't want to sell EVs. The electric car hardly needs anything, no oil filters, air filters, hoses, radiator fluid, carburetors, - just batteries.

Ah the batteries. The batteries, people will tell you, are the problem with electric cars. You just can't get very far before you have to stop for a few hours and charge them.

The electric car means operating within certain limitations and to accept limitations is, well, un-American. (Never mind that most of the recent production EVs made by Toyota, Honda and Ford could go 120 miles without a charge and that the average car owner travels less than 50 miles a day.) How we love the throbbing power of the combustion engine, the way it can haul anything, pull anything, get up any hill. May we never experience a moment of being underpowered like those laughable VW buses.

The EV is not the vehicle of the open road and wilderness adventure that auto industry advertising has convinced us to want in a car. It is more like an appliance, a refrigerator doing its job, quietly tending to the daily needs of ordinary people. It's George Jetson going to work, thrilling in a high-speed elevator kind of way and it did for me what no fuel-efficient hybrid could do. It did away with the one thing I so abhorred in a car - the gasoline and the toxic fume spewing, global warming, military imperialism that comes with it.

To enter the world of Sparrow drivers is to join a brotherhood (it is mostly men) of self-assigned beta testers willing to own a car that had unusual requirements and hadn't had all the bugs worked out. Dedicated EV enthusiasts could also work on a conversion, transforming a normal car into an electric. I had toyed with this idea for many years, but I didn't have time for this kind of project now. If I kept my Honda wagon for hauling stuff, a Vespa style scooter might do for under $2000, but not for rainy weather. Ditto the electric bicycles and mopeds. No, an enclosed vehicle was best if considerably more expensive (around $8,000 for a used one and about $17,400 new).

Sparrow owners who were selling wanted a buyer with EV experience to make sure the car would stay on the road. I read the information on the site for a week, re-living my own capacity for tinkering in the days when I owned a motorcycle as my sole transport for five years. The three-wheeled Sparrow was technically a motorcycle, surely my experience would count for something.

I contacted an owner in San Leandro, told him about my motorcycle days and that I was mechanically inclined and pretty smart for a girl. "I think you would be a perfect candidate for a Sparrow," he wrote back. He had one in the color I most wanted - yellow to match my business card. I imagined painting my logo on it with the words "specializing in downsizing, space planning and time management". Think of the marketing possibilities!

"You'll meet lots of people," said his wife.

When I saw the car in his meticulously organized garage, I could see that it had been maintained to perfection. He was a car nut, just the kind of guy you would want to buy a car from. It had been his commute car, but now he wanted to buy a Jeep wrangler for longer travels. We talked for half an hour about the car and the battery maintenance. It wasn't so hard once you understood the discipline of recharging before you were completely out of juice.

The one door opened like the cockpit of a plane with electric windows on both sides. The half size curved windshield made my head feel slightly squeezed, but overall the car did not feel so tiny that I felt vulnerable on the road as I had on my motorcycle. In fact it felt as tight and secure as a rocket ship and with the 580 lbs of batteries sitting in the bottom, it was very stable and relatively safe. The wrap around steal body was solidly formed. It might bounce, but not crush. No helmet was required. The Sparrow was the helmet. Driving it was rough, noisy and wacky, but it would do. Part amusement park ride, part warehouse forklift, the electric motor had a high whine that made me feel like I was going to blast off though it was quiet from outside.

I couldn't say yes right away. It was too crazy. I would have to negotiate with many of my clients to plug in my car when I worked with them (but it would only cost them a quarter and most of them were environmentalists anyway.) Then there was my garage which looked like the "before" picture of one of my more disorganized clients. No car had been parked there for 9 years (why pollute the house with toxic fumes). It was high time to emulate the garages of my colleagues with their adjustable shelves and neatly labeled bins. My partner was very happy about the possibility of a garage clean out. When I showed her the picture of me that my Sparrow owner had taken when I was driving it, she laughed and said, "It looks like you".

In the end I just plain fell in love with the little yellow car. I knew that if I passed up this experience for sensible reasons, I would miss out and never know what adventure such a remarkable vehicle could bring into my life. So this week the Sparrow came home to rest in my newly swept out garage and I plugged it in where the second fridge used to be.