Ernie Holden remembers the time he drove his hot rod into a gas station to fill it up. The car was a 1964 El Camino, a beast dating from the days when gas was cheap and engines were big, and its 350 cubic inches put out more than 300 horsepower in weekend competitions. Holden began filling it with, of all things, unleaded gas, traditionally thought to be the enemy of high performance.
A kid with a jacked-up Chevy Super Sport watched him, aghast. He couldn't have been more shocked if Ernie had been banging on the vehicle with a sledgehammer. "What are you doing that for?" the kid gasped.
"I don't want to ruin the catalytic converter," Ernie told him, and watched the kid react like he'd been hit in the face with a two-by-four at the very mention of the dreaded contraption.
This story illustrates the two contradictory sides of Ernie Holden, a man who railed against catalytic converters until he proved with his El Camino they don't affect performance; a man who once competed on the NASCAR Sportsman's circuit in a 1955 Chevy and is now organizing a race for solar- and electric-powered cars; a man who wouldn't mind saving the planet, but wants to be able to get from zero to sixty in less than eight seconds while he's doing it.
Ernie Holden has organized the first running of the Solar and Electric 500 this weekend. The duo of races, scheduled for this weekend at Phoenix International Raceway, will bring together most of the important people on the cutting edge of electric-car technology.
If a get-together of solar and electric cars sounds as exciting as a Greenpeace convention, if it appears to have overtones of granola and self-righteousness, or perhaps, just plain silliness, consider these facts: A company in California is working on an electric motor that will give you the performance of a Lamborghini. And there are rumors of an electric dragster that can turn a four-second quarter mile, something not even top-fuel dragsters have done yet. Electric cars are your driving future. California passed a law mandating that 2 percent of all vehicles sold in the state by 1998, and 10 percent of all sold by 2003, be emission free. Major auto manufacturers have taken that to mean one thing: electricity.
Although there is a solar race--the 500 refers to 200 kilometers for solar cars and 300 kilometers for electric ones--no one is talking seriously about those flimsy-bodied, cockroach-shaped solar vehicles as a realistic alternative to anything. Most of this weekend's solar entrants are from universities, those ivory towers whose most recent contribution to American life was deconstruction.
But electric cars are real cars--production street sedans whose engines have been replaced with electric motors. "Virtually every major automaker is rushing to get these built," Holden says.
By putting together a race, Holden hopes to dispel the notion that electric cars are like everything else that's good for you: boring.
The knock against electric cars up to this point has been that they go slow and have no range. The only production electric vehicle available today, for example, has a top speed of 53 mph and a range of 60 miles. As Holden says, when he first thought about electric cars, "I thought about getting in a golf cart and getting run over by a delivery truck."
Trying to inject sex appeal into an electric vehicle seems to be a trend in the industry today. Last year, for instance, when General Motors unveiled its prototype Impact, a good deal more was made of the car's eight-second zero-to-sixty--faster than 90 percent of the cars on the market--than of its benefit to the environment.
And one of the observers at this weekend's races is Peter Bos, whose Polydyne Incorporated in California is dedicated to developing the electric power plant of tomorrow. Bos' reaction to an electric car that sacrifices freedom, speed and acceleration is: Forget about it. "Buy it because it's the patriotic thing--that's baloney," he says.
These are men, in other words, who think a smog-free future ought to be fun.
Holden became a convert to electricity much like Saint Augustine became a convert to Christianity, after a lifetime of sin.
Holden started out racing sprint cars, tiny things that compete on dirt tracks and have the greatest power-to-weight ratio of any racing vehicle. He gets quite enthusiastic as he describes how dangerous they are, and is enormously impressive when he talks about going to sprint races with George Hurst, he of the Hurst shifter.
Holden is a guy who has bounced around a bit in his time. He taught high school, managed a couple of racing ovals in the Midwest and made drawings for a company building Indy cars in California. He lived in Phoenix in the early Seventies and came back nine years ago to open Holden Motor Company, an emissions shop. Then, he says, he realized he was turning fifty--that's scheduled for this year-- and, like a lot of guys, took stock of his life. Some men chase blondes. Holden decided to organize a race for solar and electric cars.
He is sitting in an unoccupied office in a modern building in north Phoenix, eating a sandwich. The Solar and Electric Racing Association headquarters, a single room where his wife Carol and a volunteer are working, is too much of a madhouse for an interview. Telephones are ringing. Carol is bugging him to call up a radio talk show on which the subject is electric vehicles and various conspiracy theories. (Holden pooh-poohs all of them.)
He has a big picture book devoted to the history of auto racing--he helped found the National Auto Racing Historical Society--and is flipping pages until he comes to a photo of a white car.
"In 1927 a race-car builder named Frank Lockhart had the Stutz Blackhawk," Holden begins. In the early days of automobiles, racers competed for land speed records on the long straight sands at Ormond Beach, Florida. Lockhart was one of them, and achieved 203 mph.
"When I tell you the mechanics, you tell me where we have gone with the internal combustion engine since then," Holden says, as he rattles off the Blackhawk's specs: a 182-cubic-inch V16 with four overhead camshafts and dual centrifugal superchargers with intercoolers. "The latest cars are virtually identical to this."
The point he is making is that internal combustion technology has not advanced in the slightest since 1927.
Until now. Until the electric car.
"If Lockhart came back today, he'd be surprised not that the revolution is here, but that it took so long to get here."
Even now, the revolution has been government imposed. Because of the California Air Resources Board, the automobile industry has been thrown into a situation somewhat like that in the late nineteenth century, when dozens of companies were experimenting with everything--including steam--to power a vehicle, and the final technology had not yet shaken out. Today, everyone from multinational automakers to guys in garages are working on the electric car, and even some of the companies on the cutting edge are unaware of each other's existence.
What they're working toward is a better battery. That's the stumbling block. And it's been the stumbling block for a hundred years.
Electric cars have been around since the 1880s, and were favored by ladies and strait-laced professional types, mostly because, as one historian says, "They lacked the rough and tumble excitement of the gas or steam cars."
Although they never became practical, electric cars never quite died. There are people in Phoenix, in fact, who have driven them to and from work every day. Lee Clouse, for instance, is one of the founders of the local chapter of the Electric Auto Association, a group made up mostly of retired engineers who love to tinker. Clouse drove an electric Bradley GT kit car every day for a couple of years. It ran great, but started to slow down after only twenty miles.
Because of their lack of range, electric cars could never be anything but second cars. Ray Hobbs, head of electric vehicles for Arizona Public Service, describes the situation. "The muscle cars of the Sixties had big engines," he says. "With electric cars, it's sort of almost in reverse--the batteries are big and heavy and performance is really bad, sluggish and slow."
That's where today's research is concentrating, Hobbs says. "The newer batteries are lighter and develop more energy and run a lot longer."
Hobbs' employer, along with Southern California Edison and Dreisbach ElectroMotive Incorporated (DEMI) in Santa Barbara, is sponsoring a car in this weekend's electric race. The vehicle is equipped with one of those newer batteries, a zinc-air design that DEMI created and that the company hopes can give the car a 200-mile range. Honda is supplying a CRX body.
Like other Japanese car makers, Honda has been aggressive in racing lately--it just won the Iceberg Phoenix Grand Prix--so its involvement in the Solar and Electric 500 is a sign of some seriousness. Zinc-air is by no means the final word, however. General Motors is using a lead-acid battery in its Impact--actually, 870 pounds of it. Although not in the race, General Motors will be making an appearance with a booth promoting its electric Impact. The car should go into production within the next five years. But the two-seater, whose 100-plus-mph top speed is a good deal more impressive than its 120-mile range, is viewed even by its manufacturer as a second car. But then there is Peter Bos, who is convinced he has the battery problem just about licked, and can build you the one car that will do everything. With a background in both business and engineering, Bos started his work on electric cars by realizing that people want what they've already got in the parking lot. He is a man free of prattle about doing away with air pollution by taking the bus. He loves performance cars. He works with guys who customize Porsches so they will go faster. He loves, he admits, the very idea of cars.
"For most people, it's the only time they have any privacy," he says from his company's headquarters in San Mateo, California. "I grew up in Europe, and to me a car is a wonder. If it's cold, I turn on the heat. In the summer I turn on the air conditioning. I listen to beautiful music. The concept is wonderful."
Bos believes the all-electric car will never make it, because no battery, no matter what kind, can store enough energy. Hence, his design, which can be dropped into any vehicle, uses a combination of electric motor and small internal combustion engine. The gas engine doesn't drive the car, however; it makes electricity to feed two AC motors to drive the wheels.
A car with this power plant will do everything. Ultracapacitors give it enthusiastic acceleration. A high-power density battery gives it hill-climbing ability. The gas motor, he says, is "a small electric factory that allows you to go 400 miles." A car with this driving it, he says, is no longer a second car. If it sounds too good to be true, Bos is thinking about putting his prototype motor in a race car, the traditional way technological advances have been introduced. The ultracapacitors, he says, make a car "do the Lamborghini thing." He says there are no limits to the acceleration you can develop.
That has Ernie Holden concerned. He's worrying that someone is going to get hold of one of Peter Bos' ultracapacitors, stick it under the hood of an electric car and blow away the competition. And maybe some walls, and his insurance policy. So he doesn't even want to talk about the rumor of a four-second dragster, which he heard from a General Motors guy, who heard it at a meet somewhere. He's sorry he ever mentioned it.
He doesn't want these cars to go too fast this weekend.
The Solar and Electric 500 will be held Friday through Sunday at Phoenix International Raceway. The solar race will be run in two segments, at 1 p.m. Saturday and at 10 a.m. Sunday. The electric race is at 2 p.m. Sunday. For ticket information, call 953-6672.
If a get-together of solar and electric cars sounds as exciting as a Greenpeace convention, consider an electric motor that runs like a Lamborghini.
Holden became a convert to electricity much like Saint Augustine became a convert to Christianity, after a lifetime of sin.
