Charge! The race is on to build an electric car that will drive us into the 21st century - high school student Brian Czernicki and his class mates rebuilt a rundown Fiat into a successful electric car

Science World, April 7, 1995 by Dan Grossman

When Brian Czernicki entered Connecticut's Bolton High School, he had no idea he'd soon join a crew of classmates intent on slashing air pollution and curbing global warming. But within months, he was pitching in to design and build an electric car. The goal: Develop a car that would get great mileage--and produce no pollution.

"We had a chance to make a landmark car," Czernicki says of the challenge.

Czernicki is not alone. Across the country and around the world, scientists, inventors, and backyard tinkerers are in pursuit of a "clean" car. Like Czernicki, they are looking for a replacement for gasoline-powered automobiles, which environmentalists say are the nation's worst polluters. Even the cleanest gas-guzzling cars spew a chemical stew of toxic emissions--including gases that contribute to acid rain, highway smog, and possibly global warming.

But the desire to clean up Earth's atmosphere isn't the only incentive driving these inventors. Their quest is also being fueled by strict, new air-pollution laws in America's most car-loving state, California. By 1998, at least 2 percent of all cars sold in California must emit zero pollution. So the first people to come up with a hot-selling, clean design could make huge profits.

Electric cars, which burn no fuel and emit no pollutants while running (see "Pollution-free?" p. 12), are a logical place to start. "There's no question about it," says Bob Batson, a distributor of motors, batteries, and other electric-vehicle components. "Electric cars are the future."

ELECTRIC CHALLENGE

Brian Czernicki and his Bolton classmates took up the electric challenge three years ago. It started when a former Bolton student donated a run-down Fiat X-19 sports car to Roger Titus, a technology instructor at the school. Titus and the students decided to give the car an electric overhaul and enter it in the Tour del Sol, an electric-car endurance race.

They knew they'd be competing with other high-school students, university teams, and even car manufacturers. But they were undeterred. "It was time to turn things around" and prove that electric cars are a practical alternative, says Titus.

The first task for Czernicki and his teammates was to clean up the car's rusty body. The students spent their afternoons scraping the corroded metal clean, welding on new steel, and painting. "We did an awful lot of sanding," Czernicki, now 18, recalls.

Then the students undertook the electric conversion of the car's "guts." They replaced the gas tank and engine with 16 rechargeable batteries and a motor that could run on electricity. Finally, they wired in a controller, a device that works like a dimmer switch to regulate the motor's speed.

ON THE ROAD

When the car is switched on, says Titus, it works like any other battery-operated electrical device: An electric current (a stream of negatively charged electrons) flows through a circuit (a closed loop, or pathway, of wires) to do work (run the electric motor that powers the car).

The electrons come from chemical reactions between different parts of the battery, Titus explains (see diagram, right). The reactions leave excess electrons on one of the battery's two terminals--the metal knobs that stick out--creating a negative charge there. The other terminal has a deficit of electrons and, therefore, a positive charge. When wires connect the two terminals to form a circuit, electrons flow through the wires to try to even out this difference in charge.

When the current is flowing, it turns parts of the motor--similar to the way the current of a moving stream turns a water wheel--converting the electrical energy to mechanical energy. That turning spins the wheels of the car.

The trouble, says electric-parts supplier Batson, is that the chemical reactions inside the battery eventually stop. Why? Because the reacting chemicals (reactants) have been used up--converted to other, nonreacting substances.

With the reactions stopped, there's no difference in charge between the battery terminals and, therefore, no reason for current to flow.

That's bad news if you're in an electric-car race--or on the road halfway to your destination--and the engine conks out. Then you have to recharge the battery--plug it into an electrical outlet to add energy. The charge reverses the chemical reactions in the battery and restores the unbalanced charge, Batson explains.

It's kind of like running out of gas and needing to stop to fill up the tank, says Titus. Only with electric cars, it happens more often. The two-seat "Impact," an electric car General Motors is developing, for example, gets only about 150 kilometers (90 miles) to a battery charge, in contrast to the 600 km (370 mi.) most gas-powered cars can go before the gas gauge hits empty.

Electric-car designers are trying to develop new kinds of batteries that will store more energy, charge faster, and cost less, says Batson. But even with standard lead-acid car batteries (the kind the Bolton students used to power their car), there are things you can do to get a longer ride.