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ECOfreak: Lessons on Building an Electric CarTuesday, December 21, 2010 
I’m proud to bring you an update this week about two seniors at Hampton Roads Academy who are WAY smarter than I am. I visited Aidan Rogowski and Ben Avery for the first time over the summer, when they started their senior project before they even started their senior year. Their ambitious (some might have said overly ambitious) plan was to yank out the guts of a 1995 Toyota Corolla and turn it into an electric car (read a previous blog about our first meeting here).
I’ll be the first to admit I was a Doubting Thomas when I first met them over the summer, but as I heard their plans spelled out to me in autoese that I didn’t understand at all, I started to think they might be able to at least give it a good go. The old college try, and all that. I am here to report that I stopped by on Monday, and lo and behold, that dead car that once had its engine suspended from the ceiling of Aidan’s garage actually drove right by me and came back, with two smiling boys waving from the front seats! As I peered under the hood with Aidan and Ben, I asked Aidan (the auto guru of the pair) if things had gone as planned, and how exactly this car worked. As he began speaking in that unfathomable autoese again, I smiled and nodded and figured out the basics by just looking at the rebuilt car. There’s a new engine, which used to power a forklift. The boys used a lathe to make a, um, metal thing to hold the engine in place, as best as I understood, and then they attached jumper cables to part of it. The cables run along the outside of the engine and into the front passenger side of the car, and as of now the car runs by the passenger holding the cables to two batteries on the floor. “It’s pretty exciting to be in the passenger seat,” Aidan jokes, since the terminal melts sometimes when the jumper cables touch the batteries. The jury-rigged jumper-cable system is temporary while the boys wait for a bunch of golf-cart batteries that will deliver enough juice to the car that it will be able to drive beyond second gear. They also have a “potentiometer” (yup, I learned a new word!) that, once attached, will allow pressure from the gas pedal to act as a means of transferring voltage from the batteries, thus eliminating the “exciting” co-pilot’s battery duty (I hope I got that right). The project has cost about $2,200 so far, plus a few hundred more for some additional parts. Electric Motor and Contracting also pitched in some man hours, thanks to someone there nice enough to fix the motor, which needed some serious TLC. In all, that’s not much money – but a lot of blood, sweat and tears, were spent to make this idea a reality. What impressed me most was not the grandness of the idea, though – we all have those moments of inspiration – but rather the fact that Aidan and Ben have been working on this project for six long months, and they got it right. I asked them why they got started so early, and they said, frankly, they were concerned that if they hadn’t made significant progress by the time the teacher panel started approving senior projects early in the year, their idea wouldn’t have gotten the green light. I’d say, forget the college essay. The boys should just send in their project with a college application, along with the blog they maintained, and they’ll be shoe-ins for sure! These two have a creative flourish planned out for when the project comes due in spring. They’ll drive the car to school, and park it on the stage for all to see. They promised to save me a seat for that performance. I can’t wait to see the new paint job they'll be putting on their new ride and the looks on their classmates’ faces. Of course, I asked the boys repeatedly if they were considering going into a green field when they’re older -- something like, maybe, making electric cars; alas, I couldn’t convince them. But they totally get an “A” from me on this one, for taking one more gas-powered car out of commission and for showing some real ingenuity. Tip for the week Have you ever test-driven an electric (or hybrid) car? Me, neither! Let’s all go out to a car dealership and see what it’s like. Maybe we’ll find our next favorite vehicle… or we can at least say we tried it. You can plug in at various Virginia rest stops now, did you know that? At least you know you can drive across the state (along interstates) without running out of juice. Website for the week Check out Aidan and Ben’s blog and get a sense of how much work they put into this project as you scroll through the posts.
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