No need for a fill-up

>> A father-and-son team build an electric truck to spite auto and oil oligarchs

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

It took three years and about $15,000, but the damn thing finally got on the road. Nicolas Pépin and his father Jean-Claude, a 32-year-old Montreal renovator and a 58-year-old retiree respectively, converted an '86 Mazda pickup into an all-electric, battery-powered vehicle, free from polluting exhaust fumes and gas-price gouging.

"I did it to piss off the big oil companies," says the younger self-described social activist Pépin, on why he began the project. "I detest the big corporations that don't give a shit about anybody."

Having first appeared on the road over a year and 4,200 kilometres ago, the electric truck is a smooth and quiet ride. It runs on a total of 19 Trojan golf-cart batteries--seven under the hood and a dozen under the flatbed, which is accessed using a ratchet handle and a custom-built scissor-lift. At about $160 each, the batteries have a life of between three and five years, depending on the amount of stress they undergo while in use.

The batteries have to be recharged regularly, which is a problem. The truck, if rolling at an average 80 kilometres per hour, has enough juice to run about 40 kilometres, which rules out long-distance driving. Another problem is weight. The batteries add to the already considerable heaviness: the whole truck, with batteries, breaks the scales in the neighbourhood of 4,000 pounds, twice the Mazda's normal weight. Winter driving is impossible. Slopes are another obstacle that shorten the batteries' lives.

The end product, by the Pépins' own admission, remains far from perfect. "If we had to redo it," Nicolas says, "we wouldn't have used a pickup. We would have picked some other kind of car to minimize the weight." They say they may try to build another car, but perhaps using a gas, propane or compressed air hybrid.

There are several hybrid cars already on the market. The Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight have been available to consumers for the past couple of years, and Ford promises an HEV (hybrid electric vehicle, similar in design to an SUV) by 2003. Prices are moderate: suggested retail price for the Insight, according to the Honda Web site, is around $26,000; the Prius, about $32,000. The Pépins don't think their truck could sell for under $30,000, factoring in labour and supplies.

But the technology to build an electric car exists, even if companies have been hesitant to exploit it over the years. The technology is so readily available, the Pépins learned how to build their car by reading Bob Brant's 1994, appropriately titled Build Your Own Electric Vehicle. The how-to guide was, Nicolas says, their "Bible" to getting their project going.

There is a loose network of electrical car enthusiasts in Quebec. "We met over the Internet, and meet very informally," says Pépin père. "There are about 15 individuals who are driving these kinds of cars. We've met people from all over Quebec and Ottawa."

The Internet, as usual, contains a vast reservoir of resources for electric and hybrid car technology. Almost all the sites single out the technology's environmental friendliness and efficiency as main selling points, something Nicolas also likes to mention. "Our electric car operates at 85 to 95 per cent efficiency," he says, "but a combustion engine only gets about 15 per cent."