[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 149 (Thursday, December 1, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: December 1, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                           ELECTRIC VEHICLES

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, I want to share with our colleagues 
a recent articles by Matthew L. Wald published in the New York Times 
about Noel Perrin, a professor emeritus of English and American 
literature at Dartmouth, Mr. Wald writes about Professor Perrin's 
experiences with electric cars and of his devotion to bringing about a 
pollution free environment through the widespread use of these 
vehicles.
  Automobile ownership is expected to increase worldwide by up to 50 
percent in the next 20 years. If we do not take action, the 
environmental and energy problems that will result from the use of 
gasoline-powered cares will be monumental. The air pollution and oil 
consumption will create problems that simply will be intractable. The 
widespread use of electric cars, however, would go a long way toward 
resolving our Nation's environmental and energy problems.
  For some years I have been trying to promote greater research and use 
of electric cars. And we are making progress. New environmental 
regulations have been adopted in California, New York and 
Massachusetts, and are under consideration in other States. In these 
three States, starting in 1998, 2 percent of the cars sold in the State 
must be electric. Early this year, the Ozone Transport Commission, 
representing a group of eastern States and the District of Columbia, 
voted to support California's efforts to develop a market for electric 
cars as a means of reducing air pollution. The Commission vote was a 
formal recommendation to the EPA to require ``progressively cleaner 
standards'' for automobile emissions.
  We are making progress, but we must continue our efforts. We must 
work on the problems that are inherent in any new technology. Batteries 
that take too long to recharge, the short range of travel before 
recharging, and the high cost of the electric car are some of the 
problems that must be resolved.
  There is great interest in the electric car abroad. Japan wants to 
have 200,000 electric cares in use by the year 2000, and Europe will 
not be far behind. We must encourage U.S. auto companies in every way 
we can to produce electric cars. We must get on the cutting-edge of 
this technology, Mr. President, before other nations move ahead of us.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the New York Times 
article ``A Man and His Plug-In-Car and their American Odyssey'' be 
printed in full in the Record.

          A Man and His Plug-In Car and Their American Odyssey

                          (By Matthew L. Wald)

       As bad trips through the Donner Pass go, Noel Perrin's 
     ended relatively painlessly. Nobody froze, starved or ate any 
     unusual meals; all that died was his dream of driving an 
     electric car from Los Angeles home to Vermont. Instead, he 
     rolled back down the mountain, bought a secondhand 1981 
     Toyota pickup and ignominiously towed the electric across the 
     continent.
       Mr. Perrin, a professor emeritus of English and American 
     literature at Dartmouth, has recently been teaching 
     environmental studies and driving what he preaches--just now 
     a 1983 Audi, converted to electricity in 1992. Last year it 
     made the daily run from his home in Thetford, Vt., to his 
     classroom in Hanover, N.H., 13 miles each way, and covered 
     5,000 miles; this semester he is teaching at Boston 
     University, and the Audi sits at the bus station in White 
     River Junction, where he picks it up every Friday night for 
     the drive home.
       Auto executives are very nervous about requirements in 
     California, New York and Massachusetts that beginning in 
     1998, 2 percent of the cars offered for sale must be 
     electric. But Mr. Perrin is confident: ``They've got to make 
     them attractive. But the electric cars are like those girls 
     in 1950's movies that don't realize they're beautiful. The 
     cars are attractive. It's just that Ford and Chrysler and 
     G.M. don't really realize that.''
       Could he sell the idea to 2 percent of his neighbors?
       Actually, he could, he said in a telephone interview last 
     week. ``The reason I think I can get one in 50 and probably 
     one in 20 of my neighbors to buy is almost entirely 
     environmental,'' he explained. ``Someone speculated that 
     about 1 percent of Americans are eco-fanatics but that in 
     Vermont the percentage is more like 20.''
       Professor Perrin was goaded into pioneerhood in 1990, by a 
     student who listened to his lecture on energy conservation 
     and then asked how he could drive a gas-guzzler. A few months 
     later, he flew to Santa Rosa, Calif., to buy a car from the 
     only manufacturer he could find, Solar and Electric 
     Engineering, now U.S. Electricar. It was a 1985 Escort, 
     equipped with lead-acid batteries, which he named Solo. It 
     had a quoted range of 45 to 60 miles between recharges. It 
     turned out to be less going uphill.


                             not the first

       He is a self-conscious pioneer, as he shows in his 1992 
     book, ``Life with an Electric Car'' (reissued last month by 
     the Sierra Club Paperback Library, on acid-free paper 
     containing a minimum of 50 percent recovered waste paper). He 
     wrote that he had believed he was the first to try to cross 
     the country with an electric, but found out later that others 
     had preceded him. Still, if the late 1990's turns out to be 
     the dawn of a new age of transportation, he can lay claim to 
     experiences that are already a thing of the past. One is 
     having to cross the country to find a car; there are now at 
     least 16 builders and converters around the country.
       He made the trip with nine half-pints of Vermont maple 
     syrup, to barter along the way or give to people who were 
     particularly helpful. He also carried a letter from the 
     manufacturer to show wary motel managers that his car, 
     plugged in overnight with an extension cord strung through a 
     window or into a laundry room, could not draw more than $1.50 
     worth of electricity.
       ``You can plug one in anywhere there's power right now; 
     it's just that you have to explain what you're doing,'' he 
     said.
       He did not take a gasoline-powered generator, which, he 
     said, would not have drawn converts to the cause of electric 
     vehicles. As it was, Solo did not win over everybody; there 
     was the service station attendant in Utah, for example, who 
     asked what he had paid for the converted Escort ($17,500) and 
     offered, ``Around here you could get three 1985 Ford Escorts 
     for that. Maybe four.''
       At home, Mr. Perrin avoids tapping into the local utility, 
     which simply trades pollution from a tailpipe for pollution 
     from a power plant stack. To get electricity for his car, he 
     covered the south side of his barn roof with $18,000 worth of 
     solar photovoltaic cells.
       The automakers argue that apart from some elite, special 
     cases like Professor Perrin--although ``special'' isn't quite 
     the term they use--Americans don't have the money or the 
     inclination to deal with an electric. Professor Perrin 
     disagrees.
       ``It certainly is true that right now they're more 
     expensive, because electric cars are hand-converted,'' he 
     said. But they have fewer parts than conventional cars, and 
     in three or four years, with mass production, will be cheaper 
     than internal-combustion models. ``I don't see that that's 
     particularly elitist.'' he said. ``You may say it's elitist 
     for people to buy Cadillacs and Ferraris and read Road and 
     Track or Car & Driver.''
       Detroit has drawn its own profile of who would buy an 
     electric, and Professor. Perrin fits much of it, as an 
     ``early adopter'' of new technology with unusually strong 
     views on the environment. Detroit has missed another 
     characteristic of those who buy first; they are extroverts, 
     who will roll down the window at every red light to answer 
     questions. (Solo called attention to itself with a roof rack 
     of photovoltaic cells and the words ``Solar Electric 
     Vehicle'' on its back and sides.)


                           White-Haired Fans

       ``All sorts of people, white-haired old ladies--I'm a 
     white-haired gent myself--will come up and say that they're 
     determined to have one before they die,'' he said. ``Kids in 
     high school come up, too.''
       ``Now, all of us Americans want convenient personal 
     transportation even more than we want to be good to the 
     environment. But I think there are going to be several 
     different kinds of electric cars built from the ground up.''
       In these closing years of the 20th century, Professor 
     Perrin, at 67, is like a test pilot in a battle among the 
     auto manufacturers, the air regulators, the entrepreneurs 
     and, of course, the lawyers for each. The battle is to 
     determine whose legacy will prove more enduring on the 
     American road; the contestants are Henry Ford, who perfected 
     the mass-produced internal combustion car, and his friend 
     Thomas Edison, who built the first practical electric 
     generator.
       There is another pioneer Professor Perrin would like to 
     emulate: Sacagawea, the Shoshone Indian who accompanied Lewis 
     and Clark. In later years, Sacagawea covered part of the 
     route again by train.
       ``My fantasy is just really good batteries in an electric 
     car, maybe lithium polymer,'' he said, ``because I want to 
     drive across country and visit all the places I had trouble 
     when I first brought Solo home in 1991.''
       Solo is just a memory now. The car died on a back road in a 
     collision with a telephone pole, as Mr. Perrin's book 
     recorded:
       ``There was a monster dent in front, exactly the size and 
     shape of a telephone pole, but there was no flood of sulfuric 
     acid from the forward batteries. No hiss of steam from the 
     radiator. (Couldn't be. No radiator.) Dazed as I felt, I 
     still was able to notice the one tiny bit of silver lining. 
     This head-on crash showed that electric cars are pretty safe 
     in accidents, maybe safer than gasoline cars. At least Solo 
     was.''

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