Test Driving the Tesla All-Electric Sports Car

Going Green From Zero to 60 mph in 3.9 Seconds, You Can Defy Corporate Special Interests

By Linda Nicholes
Special to the OC Voice

Americans have been led to believe that they can’t make a significant difference in much of anything once corporate and governmental interests are involved. Big oil and big automakers have historically counted on the false belief that we as American citizens cannot impact our transportation future. Plug In America, www.pluginamerica.org, a non-profit coalition of plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) advocates, proves just how incorrect that assumption actually is.

PIA was born in 2005 when a grass-roots gathering of actual and hopeful electric vehicle drivers came together in an attempt to halt the destruction of approximately 5,000 production electric vehicles as portrayed in the film documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? PIA actually managed to save 1,000 zero emission vehicles from the crusher, most of which remain on the road today. Since that time, PIA has metaphorically zoomed from zero to 60 in record time, evolving from a grassroots group to a well-respected, game-changing organization with 23,000 supporters. Today PIA helps shape corporate and legislative automotive policy. We demonstrate that when average Americans join forces to influence vested power and vested interests, the results can be truly electrifying.

As leader of the nation’s plug-in vehicle movement, PIA works through grassroots activism, legislative advocacy, education and outreach to accelerate the global shift to all-electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. We represent drivers and supporters of PEVs, including motorcycles, passenger cars and trucks, shown to be cleaner than the cleanest gas or natural gas cars. We serve on behalf of all who want to wean America off its foreign oil dependency and improve the global environment. With over 243 million vehicles on American roads, 99 percent of which are powered by oil, our work is clearly cut out for us.

While it is true that collective activism is a potently powerful force, why should Americans choose to advocate for plug-in cars? PEVs are the most efficient cars on the road. Approximately 80 percent of an all-electric vehicle’s stored energy is applied to forward momentum. Contrast this astonishing efficiency to a gasoline car in which only about 18 to 32 percent of total energy produced by the internal combustion engine actually moves the car. Energy is wastefully lost to heat, friction and the vibration of hundreds of moving parts involved in the combustion process.

All-electric cars are simply not as mechanically complex as the internal combustion engine (ICE) cars we have been driving for nearly a century. The heavy, complex machinery necessary to spark and ignite the fuel that powers ICE cars is blissfully absent in a PEV. The motor of a PEV typically has one moving part—the rotor. PEV drivers get to skip the oil change, tune-up, smog check, fluids check, muffler change, carburetor adjustment and a myriad of other required maintenance rituals we normally associate with vehicle ownership.

Oil companies and some automakers warn us to be concerned about pollution created by making electricity to power PEVs. Aren’t we simply moving pollution from the tailpipe to the smoke stack? The simple answer is no. Well-to-wheel emissions are lower—even considering the 49 percent coal-fired U.S. grid and lower still when considering the 18.2 percent imported coal-fired California electric grid. Moving pollution away from population centers as well as millions of in-your-face freeway tailpipes is a good thing too. Electricity can be produced in a number of sustainable ways: solar, wind, geothermal, hydro and tidal, making PEVs the ultimate multi-fuel automotive technology. The good news is that slowly and incrementally the grid is getting cleaner and over time. The bad news is that the biggest industrial use of electricity in California is the extraction and refinement of oil.

The historically common perception that plug-in cars are by nature staid, conservative, boring golf carts or boxy neighborhood electric vehicles is easily dismissed at first sight by the sleek, wickedly fast, all-electric Tesla Roadster sports car produced by Tesla Motors www.teslamotors.com . There is nothing staid or boring about the instant, effortless torque of Tesla’s electric motor or the car’s sleek design. Take the roadster for a spin, experience your head snapping back due to the zero to 60 in 3.9 second pulse-raising G-force acceleration and presto—your opinion of the power and the promise of electric drive changes forever.

Of course, high-end, lightning-fast sports cars manufactured for a couple of thousand fortunate individuals is one thing, but are electric motors powerful and dependable enough to be useful in an industrial setting? Be aware that a diesel locomotive charging down the tracks pulling a long line of boxcars wouldn’t be able to move a single inch without electric motors jumpstarting the train’s forward momentum with 64,000 pounds of thrust. Or consider the Port of Los Angeles’ Balqon all-electric, zero-emission trucks, each capable of hauling a 60,000 pound payload. www.balqon.com (photo)

You might agree that PEVs are worth their low-resistance tires simply based on the personal convenience of home refueling. What would it feel like to not have your everyday life disrupted by mind-numbing, time-consuming, toxic trips to the gas station? What if you were able to simply plug your PEV in at night on an as needed basis using your own electricity supply at the cost of approximately two cents a mile from a charge that would take you anywhere from 100 to 220 zero emission, highway-capable miles?

Americans use 24 percent of the world’s oil resources, but represent only four percent of the global population. In order to ensure that the oil spigot remains open to fuel our opulent but appalling transportation lifestyles, it is necessary to send hundreds of billions of dollars to regimes that could hardly be described as pro-American. Like a junkie desperate for the next fix, America apparently finds it perfectly acceptable to invade oil-rich countries, endangering the health and the lives of both citizens and soldiers, while contributing to global warming and air pollution—all in the insatiable quest for oil.

We need to read between the lives. In search of coveted black “liquid gold”, we despoil indigenous land, destroy beautiful vistas and environmentally sensitive habitat while kneeling reverently and obediently at the base of the almighty gas pump.

We are literally over a barrel because of our desperate, craven need for oil. But understand this: America does not have to stay destructively and mindlessly addicted to an ever-diminishing supply of dinosaur juice. Our oil addiction is hopefully about to start changing dramatically. Thanks, at least in part, to Plug In America’s determined activism, almost every automaker in the world has a plug-in car on its corporate drawing boards. Visit Plug In America’s plug-in vehicle tracker: http://www.pluginamerica.org/plug-in-vehicle-tracker.html to view what your electric transportation future holds.

It is up all of us to demand that plug-in electric vehicles progress from current automaker planning stages to dealership show-room floors and finally to American garages.

Linda Nicholes has a home in Huntington Harbor, where the above video was filmed by OC Voice editor John Earl