Globalizacion

[pic]
[pic]

September 16, 2011, 10:58 am
Electric Cars, the Do-It-Yourself Way
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Seth Walker, a communications consultant for sustainable enterprises, sent this photo yesterday from Portland, Ore., of a Volkswagen Beetle with an unusual accessory — an extension cord:
[pic]
Seth WalkerA 1974 Volkswagen Beetle, converted to all electric power by its owner, sitsparked at a recharging station in Portland, Ore.


Seth wrote:
This is an all-electric 1974 VW bug retrofit. The car was plugged into a public charging station (about the size of a solar-powered parking meter) on the street near Portland State University. The car to the left is an all-electric Toyota retrofit that belongs to the treasurer of the Oregon Electric Vehicle Association. He says hiscar can go 145 miles on a charge.
The guys who own these cars did the retrofits themselves. Talking with them on the street that day made me wonder about the market opportunity for electric retrofits. The new electric cars (Leaf, Volt, etc.) are getting all of the attention, but what about fixing up the old cars?
Green retrofits of buildings…represent one of the
world’s greatest “greening”opportunities. Can you imagine the carbon benefit of retrofitting cars?
I’ve seen other home-built electric vehicles, including Pete Seeger’s old battery-powered pickup truck. But this arena is not my focus so I forwarded Walker’s note and the photo to Jim Motavalli, my absolute go-to guy on all efficient things with wheels and motors (and a friend). Here’s his take:
I don’t know Seth, but I totallyagree there’s huge potential in electric vehicle retrofits, because the volume of new electric and plug-in hybrid cars is, at present, too small to meet the demand or to make a big dent in local air pollution and global warming emissions. The drawback is that it can get expensive, because you have the cost of the donor car plus the conversion. It’s easier if you start with something cheap andcheerful, like that old VW.
For the Times, I wrote about a company called Amp Electric Vehicles, which converts the Chevrolet Equinox to electric — it’s about $25k for the car, and $25k for the conversion.
Some time after this story, Amp hooked up with Iceland’s Northern Lights Energy (NLE), which placed a 1,000-car order. Full disclosure: I introduced Amp and NLE, though not as any kind of businessthing (nobody gave me a kroner) but because I’d done stories on both and they seemed to fit together — NLE was desperate to find EVs and the production ones were in short supply — with Iceland at the end of a long supply chain. Amp needed customers, and has now delivered the first couple of cars (one a Mercedes conversion). I think the Benz is going to sell there for something hair-raising, likeover $100k, but I’m not positive of that.
Felix Kramer, who is the head of Calcars.org in San Francisco (arguably “the father of the plug-in hybrid”) is also a big proponent of conversions as a stopgap while major automakers tool up to produce EVs.
I have a book coming out next month from Rodale, “High Voltage,” that goes into a lot of this.
I’m a big fan of folks living the DIY (do ityourself) life. This goes back to my sporadic music writing, when I chronicled how the Dave Matthews Band built a national audience by encouraging tape recording and trading at its college shows (we’re talking cassette tapes here, not mp3 files). Then RCA came begging to give the band a generous contract.
[pic]
NYT After more than 2,000 miles running a modified car on veggie oil, Jim Norman wrote in TheTimes in 2006 that he found few disadvantages to the transformation.
In transportation, hot rodders were ripping apart and souping up vehicles when I was a boy, with Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s Kustom Kulture spilling into popular culture in a big way.
Today, the most tinkering seems to be with vehicles running on “grease” (waste cooking oil), as you could see in the Popular Mechanics DIY Rally...