Electric cars look sharp, run cheap, but will they sell?
When Walter Reuther, the late president of the United Auto Workers, spoke of the automobile as the "Fifth Freedom," he was not referring to the electric car. Dowdy, slow, limited in range and sometimes adorned—in its first incarnation around the turn of the century—with crystal vases and plush cushions, Grandma's old electric had all the sex appeal of a limp handshake. Henry Ford's flivvers and gushers of cheap Texas oil eventually drove electric vehicles off the American road and onto the American golf course, where most of them are now.
But wait. What was that bright yellow contraption whining softly on New York City's streets last week? It was a Volkswagen Rabbit powered not by a gasoline-drinking internal-combustion engine, but by a zinc-chloride "Electric Engine" developed by Gulf & Western Industries. The G & W power system, unveiled with much fanfare, is the latest step toward the return of the volts wagon. With gasoline heading toward $1.50 per gal., with the nation bent on reducing imports of OPEC oil, and with cleaner air high on Washington's list of priorities, the electric vehicle, or EV for short, is the focus of increasing scientific and marketing attention. The EVs reincarnation could profoundly affect how Americans get around in the next century. David N. ("Jim") Judelson, G & W's president, is positively electrified by the potential. Says he: "We have an alternative here that's viable. We don't have to keep burning our resources into the air, and we don't have to keep paying the Arabs $31 a barrel."
Well, maybe. Though there are an estimated 3,200 EVs of one kind or another in use today in the U.S., a number of problems remain. Not the least is that the electric car's image is still an ancient sepia-tint photograph, a little mildewed and smelling of old lace. To hot young engineers in Detroit—where the action nowadays is in computerized fuel injection, stratified charge engines and other technologies for saving gasoline—electrics are a scientific diversion. Wall Street's auto-industry analysts reflect that mood. Says Maryann Keller, a vice president of Paine Webber: "We think of them as these wonderful little things."
A lot of time and money is being spent on these things. Electrics are no longer dowdy, at least in appearance. Experimental models are sculptured, sleek and glistening with brushed aluminum and chrome. More than two dozen of them were on display last month in St. Louis at the Third International Electric Vehicle Exposition and Conference. One of the new cars—made under U.S. Department of Energy auspices by General Electric, Chrysler and Globe-Union, a major battery manufacturer—was low slung and wedgelike, with the sexy space-age acronymic designation ETV-1 (for electric test vehicle). The car has lightweight alloy wheels and plastic windows, and runs on modified lead-acid batteries. It is, however, slow as molasses: 0 to 30 m.p.h. in 8.8 sec., 25 to 55 in an interminable 17.6 sec. It can go only 123 miles at 35 m.p.h. before it must be recharged. The ETV-l's development cost: $6 million.