It's Electric! Garage Hopes to Help Car Owners Plug In

Transcript

OPEN: Ever since big auto companies stopped rolling out electric cars in the late 1990s, Pittsburghers who want to drive a zero-emission vehicle have been waiting, and waiting. But in recent months students and professors of robotics decided to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty. They're converting a gas-burning car into fully electric at a college campus garage. Violet Law pokes her head under the hood.

LAW: It's late on a Friday night and a crowd gathers outside an auto garage in Pittsburgh. More than 30 commuters are here to check out a couple of cars that are being converted to run on electric power.

Fred Crum is in the crowd asking tons of questions. He pumps a lot of gas just to run his tree service and shuttle his kids around town. An electric car is just what he wants.

CRUM: You won't have to go to a gas station. You get in for the day, you plug your car in, you go to sleep....

LAW: Inside the shop, you won't find any grease or even a drop of oil. Instead, there are batteries and all things electrical. This is the laboratory where scientists and mechanics are working to convert a vehicle from burning gas to running ONLY on electricity. The experiment's mastermind is Carnegie Mellon University robotics professor Illah Nourbakhsh [E-La NOOR-bash].

NOURBAKHSH: A lot of us are addicted to driving. Yet, that doesn't mean we're addicted to gasoline at all. They are addicted to driving, but they're also addicted and excited about innovation and change that is good.

LAW: With money from an engineering graduate and the Heinz Endowments, Nourbakhsh and his team of programmers have been testing batteries and parts on a Honda Civic and a Scion. They're experimenting with parts that would make a battery go much farther on a single charge.

[Ambience of starting car] Nearly every day,
Nourbakhsh test drives the Scion.

NOURBAKHSH: We're gathering a whole lot of data about the characteristics of these electric cars. And we have a whole army of computer scientists in the lab who are graphing and plotting these. They are working with physicists to model how exactly these electric cars use energy and what impact it has on the batteries. So we can design the best possible electric system in the car to handle the kind of urban commuting load that we expect in Pittsburgh.

LAW: Nourbakhsh's team is also collecting data on local commutes, such as the route drivers take and the stops they make. But crunching numbers doesn't beat knowing what it takes to keep a car running.

[Ambience of auto repair shop]

The team is working with experienced auto mechanic Mike Schoenfeld. He knows the converted car has to be able to cope with a lot.

SCHOENFELD: People drive over curbs. They hit things. They do all sorts of crazy things in their cars. These cars need to be on the road for as long as possible.

LAW: Which is especially important since the conversion won't be cheap. Right now the price tag is about $10,000. Nourbakhsh is looking into bulk purchase discounts and a federal tax credit to cut the cost by half, or even more.

SCHOENFELD: We need to get a cheap, easy, and quick conversion that we can bring to the shop and the community and teach a technician how to install it and maintain it as most efficiently as possible.

[Ambience of garage crowd]

LAW: For the crowd back at the garage who canít wait to see their own cars run on electric power, this is no pipe dream. It is a tailpipe-less dream. Fred Crum, for one, is ready to get his hands dirty to make the clean car.

CRUM: Eventually I'd like to do my conversion some day, which could be within the next year or two. The technology is already there, today.

LAW: For The Allegheny Front, I'm Violet Law.