Writer's Note: This article is the first in a series that will showcase individuals who are quietly doing their bit to prevent further global warming. These people are not rich or famous; environmental living is simply part of their modus operandi. Maybe you will garner some tips on how you can quietly do your bit as well.

Ugly? Yes. But, if a fish-farmer can build one, why can't Big Auto?

People, you’re going to have to get over the car. You’re going to run out of oil. Get over it. The romance is finished. You might be in love with your car, but the car’s going to die and you’re going to have to leave it by the side of the road because there’ll be no oil. We’ve managed to burn it all up in a few generations. – Andrew Arbon, farmer and inventor

Andrew Arbon sees the other side of Peak Oil as clearly as the lines on his hand. And he’s done more than his share of preparation. All he can do now is wait for technology to catch up with him. He’s sure that one day the scientists and engineers of the world will come to his party.

He has built a stand-alone, solar-powered, electric car for city commuters.

Andrew lives nowhere near a city – he’s a South Australian dirt farmer-cum-sustainable fish farmer on the gulf plains of Yorke Peninsula. Nevertheless, his fascination for electricity and technology lead the farmer to search for city-bound solutions. He told me about it in an interview at his Port Broughton farm.

I saw a really glaring need for a commuter car that doesn’t need petrol. Most people have two cars and they use one just to drive to work. Surely someone can develop an electric car that will take care of that. That would take care of half the fuel consumption in a city.

Andrew studied other electric cars that had been developed, and figured they were not going the distance.

A lot of electric cars plug into the power grid. Environmentally, you’re not much further ahead because you’re using fossil fuels to make that electricity, whereas my car is a stand-alone, solar-powered car.

I came up with the idea of a car that is driven to work 30 or 40 kilometers, parked in the parking lot, charged up by the sun while the owner is at work, then driven home.

Andrew’s prototype car is parked with its nose pointing northward, alongside his house: An old Datsun station wagon, bereft of its back seat, full of square boxes and covered in solar panels. But the prototype uses 2007 technology and Andrew needs something better.

Boxy, but good

First, some history about the man.

Since I was a little kid, I’ve been messing around with electricity. When I was in primary school, in the ‘50s, 240-volt power came through and all the old DC radios and DC motors were redundant. People gave them to me rather than throwing them in the dump. I dismantled 27 old radios and pulled to pieces quite a few old 32-volt DC motors, so I learned about electronics. I was 7 or 8 years old.

Andrew’s fascination for electricity spread to solar power in the 1990s. He started installing solar panels to power farm infrastructure like water bores and other pumps, and tapped into solar power for hot water. About 18 months ago, he turned his attention to transport.

He bought an ’88 Datsun station wagon and retrofitted it to see what would happen. He pulled out the back seat to make way for a battery bank and inverter, replaced the petrol motor with an electric motor, replaced the drive with a fluid system, and attached solar panels to “… every conceivable panel.”

Solar technology

With a tight budget, Andrew took solar panels from existing farm projects and bolted them to his Datsun.

They’re just conventional, heavy, flat solar panels that fit rather oddly on the round curves of the car. My car looks like nothing on earth – it’s got edges sticking everywhere; it’s the ugliest car I’ve ever seen. You can’t see the car for solar panels; the roof’s covered and the bonnet’s covered. Even though I have tried to make a wedge shape so that the wind flows up over it, the wind flows under the panels and it’s not an aerodynamic car. Also, the weight of all that framework is a hindrance.

Now they’ve brought out panels that are flexible: they just roll them out and stick the panels on. If you were to make a car out of these stick-on panels, you would cover every surface, even the round surfaces. The car would look much better and be more aerodynamic. I envisage factories that fabricate all the fenders and panels out of solar panels instead of sheet metal.

Andrew’s car takes a number of hours to charge up after a 40-kilometer commute around the farms.

When the car’s running it uses 300 amps and the panels charge at about 30 or 40 amps. It’s a colossal difference. In theory it takes 10 hours to replace that 300 amps.

But solar technology is really improving. In a few years that same area of panels will produce 60 to 100 amps, and then it would take two or three hours to charge and you’ll get a lot more kilometers per charge. I’m excited about it because some big company will develop a solar-powered car that will do the job. You watch.

Batteries

Andrew bought four 12-volt batteries for his prototype.

It runs on 48 volts. I’ve got four deep-cycle cell batteries which are quite advanced as far as lead acid batteries go, but still very primitive compared to what will be developed in the coming years. Deep cycle batteries can be charged and flattened thousands of times and it won’t damage them. If you let a conventional car battery go flat a couple of times it’s ruined.

The batteries are very heavy; lead acid batteries have been made for a hundred years – they came out in the old T-model Fords. The one’s we’ve got today are just a bit more streamlined, but they’re based on the same technology.

Now they’re toying with all sorts of fantastic batteries that will store ten times the amount of electricity, weighing only a fraction of the weight. Instead of a range of 40 kilometers, in theory you should get 400 kilometer’s range and then instead of batteries weighing 500 kg, you’re probably down to 150 kg. So my car’s ahead of its time. In ten years time, when these new batteries come out, this car will really go.”

Inverter

An inverter that transforms power to 240 volts replaces the Datsun’s back seats.

The car’s got quite a big 240-volt inverter in it – big enough to run a house. The theory is that you could put your tent in the back of the station wagon, drive to where you’re camping, pitch your tent and plug your TV in.

I had some people camping on my property. Quite a few campervans came in and I didn’t have enough power points for them all, so I said to the last two, “You’re going to have to plug into the car.” They looked at me and said, “What are you talking about?” I said, “I’ll bring it over.” So I parked the car between their campervans, lifted up the back and plugged them into the inverter.

A closer look at the car in its current location reveals a cable running from the car to Andrew’s house: the Datsun powers his fridge and freezer. Motor

Andrew may have bought new batteries, but his Steptoe and Son ethic came in handy for the motor.

I tried a lot of different configurations and sizes of motors, and the one I came up with in the end was pretty right. It’s a 16-horse power, 48-volt DC motor. I bought it from a surplus store, but I think it originally came out of some sort of army machine, probably a tank turret. It’s a great, big, heavily built, indestructible thing.

Why did he go for something so big?

Well, it’s doing some hard work and DC motors are fairly hard to come by - you can’t really buy them off the shelf because nobody’s making electric cars. I had to go to various different places to get what I needed to do the job.

So how does the electric engine differ from a petrol system?

They’re totally different. This car emits no greenhouse gases. The batteries give off oxygen and hydrogen and the car won’t use a drop of oil in its lifetime.

Andrew is excited about advances in electric motor technology.

They’re making motors now that are much more efficient with different sorts of bearings in them. My old motor probably came from the Second World War. It’s a good, powerful motor but hungry on the juice – made by the Americans. I actually looked into getting a modern efficient motor - a Japanese make - but the motor alone was going to cost around $10,000, and I couldn’t come at that.

Drive

Getting power from the motor to the wheels requires drive. Andrew’s drive system is something special.

In most electric cars, the motor starts up at low revs and tries to pick up revs to make the car go - that uses a colossal amount of electricity. On this car the motor does 3,000 revs all the time.

If you hooked up a motor doing 3,000 revs directly to a drive chain in a car and dropped the clutch, something would break! To address this, I’ve put in a fluid drive system that gradually, in a few tenths of a second, transmits the power from the motor to the drive.

Fluid drive is a fairly old concept but it’s very similar to a torque converter. It’s got two revolving discs and runs in oil. One disc flings the oil against the other disc and makes it drive. The closer those discs come together the more drive occurs. The fluid drive starts at a 4:1 ratio and then picks up to 1:1 in a matter of milliseconds.

I bought the drive from Japan, straight off the shelf. Apparently they use them in some sort of a buggy; it’s a little round thing that’s got lots of magic stuff inside.

In the next ten years there’s going to be fantastic improvement in drive mechanisms too.

Hasn’t a fluid drive got oil in it?

Yes it does, but it’s like having transmission fluid in a car. You never have to change it – it doesn’t use it and doesn’t lose it.

Gearbox and clutch

The drive and motor might be special, but the gearbox is standard. The clutch, however, is a bit more complicated.

I’ve got it rigged up with a conventional gearbox, however it becomes a little weird when it comes to a clutch. I haven’t got a foot clutch; it’s an electromagnetic clutch with a little knob on the top of the gear stick that you press when you want to put the clutch in and out of gear.

I’ve got a five-speed gearbox in the car and the fluid drive is four speeds, so in theory there are 20 gears. But only five gears are used. You put it into first gear and the fluid drive starts up at 4:1 and then rapidly goes 1:1 - that’s four gears there; you go into second gear and the fluid drive does the same thing, from 4:1 down to 1:1 – another four gears; and so on. One disc gradually makes the other disc rev to the same speed; when they come close enough together, they’re doing the same speed. And then when you go to the next gear, they come apart and do the same again. It’s a wonderful little thing.

How does someone actually drive such a contraption?

It’s a weird car to drive initially; it took me a while to get used to. You get into the car and turn on the power by just clicking a switch. The engine makes a whirring noise – nothing like an internal combustion engine though – and the engine’s going at full revs immediately. To take off you’ve got a clutch on the back of the gear stick that you work that with your thumb. You press the clutch out of gear and then you press it down to put it into bottom gear. There’s no accelerator, just a switch that you press with your foot - you press the switch and the car glides away as smooth as silk. To increase speed you go up through the gears. You modify your speed with the gears, so if you want to slow down quickly, you take your foot off the switch and the whole thing pulls up fairly rapidly. And then you put your foot on the brake.

It’s not as convenient as a petrol car to drive but it’s not using any petrol. I went 500 kilometers and I didn’t use a drop of petrol. How’s that for mileage?

Cost

So what did Andrew’s prototype cost him?

I already had the panels, so they didn’t cost me anything; the batteries were about $2,000; the electric motor was $1,200; the fluid drive was another $800; the car cost me $1,000 – I suppose I spent between $5,000 and $6,000 all together. If you were manufacturing it, all of those parts would have to be new. Mass-produced, they’re not going to be a cheap car because there’s a lot of expense that comes into it.

A $6,000 electric car with no petrol costs – sounds like an innovation worthy of interest already. Someone with more enthusiasm might be in the city patenting the copyright on this contraption right now. But Andrew’s not keen to try marketing his invention. He’s got plenty of work to do in his an organic garden and “green” fish farm; there are wheat crops to watch and sunsets to muse over; and, just secretly, Andrew doesn’t like the big city much.

Further Reading:

• The Electric Car Revisited
• Who Killed the Electric Car