hot-rod? try eco-mod
T
by zach zorich
oyota had prepared for the
Green Drive Expo held last July at the Dane County Fair, in Madison,
Wisconsin, by erecting two giant booths fes-
tooned with multicolored banners and fronted by gleaming models of its 2012 Prius. Nearby, Ben Nelson, a bespectacled 35-year-old from Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, sat behind a folding 2 6 onearth
winter 2011/2012
table with a fake wood-grain top and a taped-on, handwritten sign reading “Freedom From Foreign Oil” and “Home-Built Electric Car.” A black Geo Metro, sporting vanity license plates exhorting “REVOLT,” was parked at his side. A few minutes earlier, wandering the floor of the Expo, I’d been checking out some of the vintage vehicles on display. There was a Carter-era electric car called the Electrek, whose passenger compartment was a squat, four-sided chamber of beige fiberglass that looked like a lopped-off Egyptian pyramid with a sunroof. Had the builder of the thing done so in response to the oil shortage at the time of the Iranian revolution in 1979? All I can say is that the Ayatollah would have had a good laugh over it. Next to the Electrek sat the corroded and dented body of a three-wheeled vehicle with a robin’s egg–blue paint job and bug-eye headlights. It looked more like an animated Disney character than anything that would actually take you somewhere. The quirky old vehicles had me thinking about how completely unserious have been the attempts in this country to address our addiction to oil. Ben Nelson had obviously gotten to that conclusion earlier. (For more on electric cars and the people who love them, see Adam Aston’s review of High Voltage, on page 56.) He and others like him are part of an emerging subculture known as eco-modders, guys (there appear to be few women involved) united around the idea that we can beat that dependence—by starting in our own backyards. Rather than soupingup their vehicles to go faster, eco-modders pimp their rides with a nod toward preserving the planet. And representatives of this new twist on the hot-rodder had descended on Madison, eager to flaunt their cars, talk shop, and compete in the MPG Challenge—an 18-mile race through the city streets to determine whose ride gets the best mileage. Though his license plates might lead you to believe otherwise, Nelson said he hadn’t come to eco-modding by way of politics. “I got sick of cars,” he explained. “I’ve had some crappy beater cars that just didn’t run well.” Also, he added, “I can’t afford a brand-new Prius.” So one day in 2008 he decided to get serious. Creating the “Electro Metro” in the driveway of his suburban home involved buying a mostly rustfree 1996 Metro for $500 and replacing its nonfunctional engine with an electric forklift motor he’d stumbled across in a junkyard. He took out the old fuel tank, installed a set of lead-acid batteries, and rigged up a computer “controller”—basing it on an open-source design that some friends had put together—to regulate power flow between the batteries and the motor. When it’s fully charged, the car can travel at 45 miles an hour for 20 miles. Nelson charges the batteries from a standard three-prong household outlet, and he pays an extra $3 a month to get electricity from renewable resources. Taken together, these measures render the vehicle practically carbon-neutral. In addition to the Metro, Nelson had brought along the Kawasaki motorcycle he’d converted from gas to electric power, a project that had helped prepare him for the more labor-intensive car conversion. Guileless and mustachioed—think Ned Flanders from The Simpsons—Nelson supports his wife and infant daughter by working as a freelance video producer. It’s a background that has come in handy in his transition from backyard tinkerer to eco-modding evangelist: log on to YouTube and you’ll see that the guy has made (and stars in!) no
illustration by mike byers/levy creative
living green