LOW-BATTERY-RIDERS:

Who's Resurrecting the Electric Car?: Forget those poky little golf cars — the battery-powered muscle car is just around the corner (JUDITH LEWIS, 7/12/06, LA Weekly)

The 1946 Oldsmobile that sits amid the old boat hulls and flywheels in the Reverend Gadget’s Culver City machine shop harks back to an era of voluptuous curves and radiant chrome; its owner, actor and comedian Tommy Chong, calls it “Ace,” and considers the car so exquisite that he lists it among his collection of sculptures. Open the door, however, and it looks like somebody doused Chong’s baby in gasoline and torched it: There’s no engine, no seats, no pedals — nothing, in fact, but a small white box bolted to the floor where the back seat should be, with two wires connecting the box to some contraption in the trunk.

“That’s for the air bags,” says Reverend Gadget, a.k.a. Greg Abbott, the craftsman, lay engineer and artist who’s restoring Chong’s Olds. A compact, muscular man, with a boyish grin and blue eyes that crinkle up when he laughs, he ushers me around the back of the car to see a little black machine branded “Praise the Lowered.” He flashes a smile and winks. “It’s a lowrider.”

When he finishes outfitting the Olds with a DC motor, enough serial-wired, nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) D-cell batteries to produce 340,000 watts of power, and a computerized controller to connect the two, Chong’s ride will be the first all-electric vehicle to bounce down San Fernando Road competing for glory with the ’60s-era Chevy Impalas of the Imperial Car Club. It will also do speed when necessary. “He’s getting a huge motor,” says Gadget of Chong. “He’ll be able to do burnouts in this car.”

And so what if the electric engine whines more than vrooms? “It’ll be my spaceship,” says Chong, who currently drives a Prius. “These cars glide. The only sound you’ll hear will be the sound system and the air bags.” Plus, he says, “by driving the ultimate electric stoner car, I can get off the titty. You know, the oil titty.”

There was a time not too long ago that Chong thought electric cars were only for “guys like Ed Begley — you know, people who wear Birkenstocks and don’t eat meat.” Only a year ago, he was building Ace as a hot rod with a gasoline engine. Then he went to a party at Gadget’s place and, as he puts it, “got educated.”

“He had all his cars sitting out, and I saw the possibilities,” Chong says. “He showed me the benefits of it all and how perfect it is, and how fast can it go. Now I don’t want to put gasoline in anything.”

Despite the reputation electric vehicles have as poky little wagons for hippies and old people, the electric muscle car has been around for a while. There’s even a National Electric Drag-Racing Association (NEDRA) devoted to high-performance electrics.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 15, 2006 1:39 PM