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Getting Down to Nuts, Bolts - and Volts
BNH speaks with Don Narducci, a professor at Naugatuck Valley Community-Technical College and advisor to the school's Electric Car Club, which recently attended a two-day conference on energy, transportation and electric vehicles in Concord, N.H.
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Business New Haven
1/10/2000
By: BNH
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What does the Electric Car Club do?
At NVCTC we have different clubs, and about nine years ago a few students asked me to be their advisor for an electric car club. Students from all disciplines can join. They don't have to be technical students, as long as they have an interest in what we're doing. It's free to belong to it, but we expect them to do a certain amount of work: electrical work or mechanical work, or whatever is required to convert a vehicle to electric power or revise our present electric vehicle.
Where do you get the money to pay for this?
We raise our own funds, and we get funds from the student government. We win money occasionally in races: We've won up to $2,000 for coming in first place in our category. Occasionally we get funds from people who donate money. We get a lot of services in kind from small machine shops and other suppliers, electrical equipment and what have you from the Waterbury and Naugatuck area. We don't have a lot of money. Some of my students say, 'Wouldn't it be nice if we had $30,000?' and I say, 'If you had $30,000 you wouldn't know what to buy.' I think it's good that we don't have too much money, because we are more creative. We learn to use the things at hand.'
What are some recent races you've entered?
We've participated in about nine Tour de Sol races. These are road rally races. This next one is going from New York City to Washington, D.C. in May. It takes a week. The students have to go away for a week. They give up a week of working or of vacation. I go with them. They have a lot of preparation to do before the race. They have to fill out the forms, and it costs almost $3,000 to take seven students and an advisor for a week to pay for food and lodging. We've won $500, $2,000 and $1,000. So if you do well, you bring back some funds.
Tell us about the event in New Hampshire.
They invited us to bring our vehicle up to show it at the conference. The conference really was for educators, teachers in middle and high school, to get students interested in ways of getting less pollution in the environment from vehicles. They wanted us to bring our team and vehicle up to demonstrate what we had done, because we had been a participant and a winner. So four students and my wife and I went up, and we drove the hybrid vehicle from Waterbury to Concord (N.H.). This is the first time we've taken the vehicle out. Our vehicle is one of a kind; we designed it ourselves. It doesn't have any extensive testing, but it ran really well at highway speeds - no problem.
How did you design your car, and how would you describe it?
Our vehicle is a white Chevy pickup truck. It looks just like a regular pickup truck. It's a hybrid vehicle, which means that it can be driven as either an electric vehicle or an internal combustion vehicle, or we can use both systems. We can stay up with traffic, driving 80 miles per hour, or five miles per hour in town - whatever is required. We try to drive it in town as an electric vehicle, because it is less polluting and it is quieter. Then, when we get on the highway, we fire up the internal combustion engine, and drive it as a hybrid, using both the internal combustion engine and the DC motor, and that gives us over 100 horsepower. It performs really well.
How long have you worked on it?
We bought this vehicle about five years ago. We used to have a Ford Escort station wagon, which was just an electric vehicle. We first built that for a certain voltage, then we added batteries for more range. Then we got special tires to reduce the weight.
What happened to that car?
We found that our first vehicle was wearing out, and we reached the point where we wanted to do something more exciting. So we bought a small pickup truck, which we felt offered more design opportunities. It has a stronger frame, you can put more batteries and do more things with it. First we built this truck as an electric truck, and we raced it that way for a couple of years. We learned a lot. We decided that we were limited in our range, and we wanted to do something else. We were able to get a small new three-cylinder Suzuki engine, and we configured this truck with the engine and an electric clutch and a DC motor, so that we could use it as a hybrid vehicle. We decided to go with propane, because propane is less polluting than gasoline. So we had to convert the engine to propane and put a propane tank on the truck. We're still learning, and we have a hybrid unit that is in some ways similar to the Prius, which is a hybrid vehicle that is going to be marketed by Toyota in this country next spring.
Do you believe electric cars are economically feasible?
Well, besides the Prius, there is an electric vehicle being marketed in this country right now by Honda. The Prius is similar in many ways to our car. Our car is a hybrid that can be driven either way. We don't have the control to make the systems invisible from each other. The Prius is accelerated with an electric motor and then the internal combustion engine takes over and continues. The excess energy goes back to the engine. Our car does not have the regeneration that the Prius does because we are using lower-tech stuff.
Aren't American cars getting more energy-efficient?
They are getting less polluting, but people are driving more and more. So the amount of pollution going into the air is increasing, not decreasing. If we can show that alternative fuel can reduce pollution - and it really can - maybe people can be a little more serious about efficiency. Electric vehicles are just one example of a more effective use of energy. And where can you get the electric power? A lot of it you can get from solar.
If electric cars are about to be marketed commercially, will your club still have a mission?
My students and I feel that we're proof of the feasibility of these things. If high school and college students can do it, certainly industry can do it - if there is enough interest and attention.
The cars are becoming more and more economically viable. You can buy an electric car now, which has a range of about 50 to 60 miles, for about $20,000. They aren't making these cars by the thousands; they're making them by the dozens, and that is why they are more expensive. When you begin to get economies of scale, rather than these almost hand-crafted cars, the prices will go down. We aren't there yet, but we are making progress, and we need to continue to educate people. That is part of what our club does.
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