How a bunch of speed-hungry, rubber-burning, adrenaline-pumped environmentalists get their kicks.
I'm cruising with John "Plasma Boy" Wayland, who has allowed me to drive his customized mint '72 "Blue Meanie" Datsun fitted with a 300-watt sound system and (count 'em) 13 state-of-the-art Optima Yellow Top 12-volt batteries. Wayland loads the stereo with a Bach Busters CD, and Toccata and Fugue in D Minor flows from 10 speakers and 4 subwoofers as we head out from his suburban home in Portland, Oregon.
"Police, they're everywhere," Wayland mutters, sounding like a homeowner complaining about termites, as he eyes a passing patrol car. "Turn right, here." He checks that the cops are out of sight. "OK, don't bother to downshift, just hit it!"
I mash the pedal. Tires squeal and I get that kicked-in-the-ass feeling as the Datsun leaps forward, ready to do 0 to 60 in around nine seconds. Eerily, there's no roar from the engine and no smoke from the tailpipe. In fact the Datsun has no tailpipe, because those 12-volt batteries don't just run the stereo - they power the entire car.
The Optima batteries Wayland uses didn't exist five years ago; nor did the solid-state controller that moderates their output in the same way a dimmer controls a halogen lamp. Modern controllers can handle huge surges of power - up to 1,200 amps at 156 volts in the Datsun. That's 10 times the wattage a typical home would consume with all its lights burning and every appliance running.
But Wayland isn't into power for its own sake; he has a profoundly ambitious agenda. In collaboration with a core group of renegade backyard engineers, he believes he can achieve the goal that has eluded ecofreaks for more than two decades. By rethinking the whole concept of electric cars and presenting them as sexy consumer items, ultimately he hopes to entice millions of Americans to abandon their long love affair with gasoline-powered automobiles.
"I consider myself an environmentalist," Wayland says. "I believe we have to do something about internal combustion engines. But environmentally conscious people deal in guilt and want us to feel bad. I don't accept that. I say, build an electric car that is exciting and fun and gets your adrenaline pumping, and then people will want electric cars."
His tactics haven't made him popular. Anna Cornell of the Electric Auto Association, which has been promoting electric vehicles since 1967, sounds vexed and edgy when Wayland's name is mentioned. "People like him are a little on the wild side," she says, trying hard to be nice about it but suggesting that his excesses seem a gross violation of the usual conservationist ethic.
In fact Wayland has been pissing off environmental special-interest groups for more than 15 years. Back in 1984, at an electric-car rally, he recalls, "I was in my gleaming, beautiful vehicle with the stereo cranking, and they said, 'Wait - what are you doing here?' They thought I was in the wrong place because my car didn't have duct tape and wires hanging out of it, and didn't look like a rolling science project. They said, 'Where are your batteries?' I told them that was the whole point; I didn't want people to see any batteries. I mean - it's supposed to look like a car."
Adding outrage to insult, Wayland demonstrated the low-end torque of his DC motor by smoking his tires, choking spectators with localized air pollution. The ecofreaks were not amused. "They don't want you to have fun," he complains. "They want you to drive a three-wheeled cockroach that goes 35 miles an hour and if you get hit by a motorcycle, you're dead. No radio, because that's fun. No carpeting, because it might be some animal fiber. Well, we're not going to play their game anymore. We are starting a new game."
Now 47, Wayland taught himself auto engineering by building gasoline-powered hot rods as a kid. "My brother had a 327 Corvette, and I had a '55 Chevy that was hopped up. But also I worked with electricity - I always had battery-powered toys. I could see that electricity could be the way to go."
In 1980 he took the first step: electrifying his salvaged Datsun. Initially he used just eight 6-volt batteries, and his own controller. "I had shrapnel all over the walls when it blew up," he recalls.
After perfecting the controller, Wayland grossly underestimated its power throughput when he tried to back out of his driveway. "I twisted the drive shaft, broke an engine-mount bolt, and cracked the transmission case, leaking fluid for 20 feet. Plus, I burned rubber all the way into the street."
When the damage was fixed, he managed a test run - and was pulled over by the police.
For more than a decade Wayland remained an electrified radical lost in the smog, with few disciples. Finally, in the 1990s, the rest of the world started to catch up with him. In Phoenix, auto-racing enthusiasts Mike Shaw and Don Karner rented a track and staged the world's first all-electric drag race, which became an annual event. Wayland entered it in 1996 with another '72 Datsun, named White Zombie after the heavy-metal band. This car used an experimentally modified forklift truck voltage controller - which turned out to be dead on arrival, leaving him with no way to moderate the power. In desperation he switched the full battery voltage with two huge relays, so that the car was either "on" or "off." "I burned rubber in all five gears," he recalls, "and won first place in my voltage class."
At the same event, General Motors entered the prototype of its electric vehicle, the EV1, which the company raced against another amp-hungry maniac: Roderick Wilde, a tall, bearded, long-haired, leather-clad figure who looks more like a biker gang member than a race-car driver. In fact, he rides a big Suzuki motorcycle, and sometimes wears a black beret with "Born to be Wilde" hand-embroidered around the edge.
Wilde had already racked up his own string of dubious achievements. "My first race was in 1993," he says, "in the Solar & Electric 500, sponsored by APS [Arizona Public Service Company, an electric utility]. We went so fast they eliminated our race class because it was too dangerous."
At the 1996 drag races, Wilde adds, "the announcer got my name wrong and the name of my car wrong, but I beat GM's car by two whole seconds."
Afterward, he and Wayland hung out in a sports bar with a third hot-rodder, Dennis Berubé (pronounced "beh-RU-bay"), whose electric vehicle was a true dragster - the kind with massive tires at the back, teeny wheels at the front, a hand-welded tubular steel frame, and a wedge-shaped body of flat aluminum plates. The three of them discussed creating their own affiliation: the National Electric Drag Racing Association.
A year later, NEDRA defied expectations by becoming a reality, with Wayland as president and Wilde as vice president. In a summit meeting attended by EV advocates from across the country, they hammered out rules and safety regulations that have been recognized by the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA). A whole new racing category now exists for the "amp suckers."
Poised to go mainstream, NEDRA started its own drag races in Woodburn, Oregon. And I decided to check them out. Clearly, this would be the best opportunity to evaluate NEDRA's chance of fulfilling Wayland's dream: to bury the stodgy environmentalist heritage, transform EVs into fetish objects for speed-hungry teens, and bring about a green revolution in garages across the US.
Forty miles south of Portland I take the Woodburn exit from I-5 and follow a two-lane blacktop across flat wheat fields punctuated with barns and old wooden farmhouses. After a couple of miles I find the Woodburn Dragstrip: a two-story control tower, a concession stand, and a few tiers of sun-warped bleachers beside a scarred stretch of asphalt that stretches away into the haze.
Today, Friday, a marquee-style sign outside the strip proclaims "Street-legal drags." This means that any Camel-smoking, Bud-drinking, tire-kicking farm boy can bring his hopped-up 1970s gas-guzzling muscle car and run fender-to-fender down the quarter mile in an all-American folk ritual straight out of a James Dean movie.
The electronerds aren't scheduled till tomorrow - but some of them are turning up anyway. Dennis Berubé is here, unloading his purebred dragster from a long, white, professional-looking box-shaped trailer that he's hauled from his home in Arizona. The navy blue racer is decorated with spiffy electric-discharge patterns in special reflective paint. On its rear, in block letters just above a big on/off switch, is a challenge: "$1,000 TO ANY ELECTRIC QUICKER." Berubé's car holds the current world speed record for any electric vehicle, and he has a standing cash offer to anyone who can shut him down.
He's suntanned, amiable, low-key, without the edge that you'd expect from a speed maniac. In fact his modest manner and large-lensed glasses make him look like a clerical worker - although the appearance is deceptive. "I've always liked drag racing," he says. "When I was a kid I raced electric slot cars. I'd tweak them and soup up the motors, race against other kids in the neighborhood - and take their cars home with me."
His first real car was a '65 Buick Grandsport, which he raced in suburban Connecticut. "I used to run every Friday night with maybe 1,000 people, right on the freeway. The cops would be there, but there were too many of us for them to do much about it. We'd make the windows rattle on the McDonald's. You could get 120-octane Sunoco back then, for 29 cents a gallon." He smiles at the memory.
One night, when he was driving alone, a couple of patrol cars pursued him. "I tried to outrun them. I made a turn onto a side street, but at the end of it was an entrance to a football field, with two steel posts. I had my lights off, and I ran right into both those posts. They mashed both my fenders, all the way up to my doors. I was just jammed in there and couldn't get out, and the cops arrived and started laughing at me. They'd given me tickets before for speeding and reckless driving. After that I wasn't allowed to drive for four years, so I went into the Air Force."
Eventually Berubé relocated to Phoenix, where he started his own welding repair business. "In 1991 I had a service call at a racing shop where they built dragsters. I repaired their welder in five minutes and talked to the guy for three hours about an electric dragster. I said, 'Let's do it!' So they built it for me - an orthodox chassis to NHRA supercomp specs. I have 28 batteries, giving 336 volts at 1,200 amps. The cables are about an inch in diameter."
So far, the car has cost him about $90,000, but it's cheaper and easier to run than a comparable gas-powered dragster. There's less maintenance and no tune-ups, and after each race a recharge from his portable generator costs about 30 cents.
I ask him how the car feels when he takes off. "It's a kick. I cover the first 60 feet in 1.3 seconds. You feel the acceleration pull your face back. I do one-eighth of a mile in 6 seconds, reaching 105 mph. The last eighth, the performance falls off because I have no transmission. There's so much torque from the motor, it cracks gears."
Like others in NEDRA, Dennis Berubé is an eco-evangelist. "When people see my car, they realize electric cars don't have to be like golf carts. So, this is the right thing to do - for ecology, and to get kids interested in the whole idea."
Naturally I want to drive the dragster, and Berubé sees the look in my eye. "You can take it around the pit area if you want," he says, trying to sound offhand about it.
Well, all right! I squeeze into the seat, scraping my knees on the aluminum body and bumping my head on the roll bar. "Whatever you do," says Berubé, pointing to a button mounted on one spoke of the tiny steering wheel, "don't touch that. Don't even think of touching it. That would initiate the race sequence." In other words, the car would hurl itself forward under control of a program optimized to run the quarter-mile in just over 10 seconds.
"If you do touch it," he says, after a thoughtful pause, "just hit that switch over there." He points to a toggle switch that's barely accessible at the far left of the cockpit. I imagine myself fumbling for it as the car winds up and shoots toward the chain-link perimeter fence 400 feet away. Probably I could hit the switch around the same time the car hit the fence.
Still, this is no time to wimp out. Berubé shows me another button (close to the one that I'm not supposed to touch), which will nudge the dragster along gently. I press it, and the car rolls forward. There's no suspension, so I feel every crack in the asphalt. The dragster makes an electric grinding noise, like an old-fashioned streetcar.
The "pit area" at Woodburn is a desolate expanse like an abandoned parking lot. I trundle around it at 25 miles an hour, hauling on the steering, uncomfortably aware than I'm guiding the most precious object in Dennis Berubé's entire life. Finally I wrestle it back to his trailer.
A couple hours later the gas-guzzlers arrive: Mustangs, Camaros, GTOs - all pre-1980 - fitted with monster V-8s. The race fee is only 20 bucks, and you can make as many runs down the track as time permits. I walk among the cars as they line up with their engines rumbling, while the drivers' girlfriends sit on the bleachers eating corn dogs and drinking 7-Up. Then the racing starts, and it sounds as if tigers are being tortured here among the wheat fields. Screaming tires, roaring motors - it's a testosterone-fueled, head-hammering ritual as the drivers pair off like elks banging their antlers together at the start of the mating season.
"Still makes my knees tremble jest like I was a teenager," says a 45-year-old driver who resumed racing when his sons got old enough to challenge his alpha-male status. Bearing in mind that "knee trembler" was 1960s Liverpudlian slang for a stand-up blow job, it's no surprise to see the vocabulary of fuel injection and blowers (superchargers) perverted in a dashboard sticker that reads, "Injection is nice, but I'd rather be blown."
In fact, this event reeks even more of sublimated sex than of exhaust fumes - and the noise is an intrinsic element. "In my opinion," says a veteran race watcher, "the guys whose vehicles make the most noise have the shortest dicks."
Into this bastion of heartland macho posturing comes mild-mannered Dennis Berubé, edging his car up to the start line. He spins the fat tires to warm the rubber for better adhesion, and then - he's gone! His dragster drifts away like a bird on the breeze, easily outpacing his rival, a 5-liter behemoth that bellows futilely as it falls behind.
The electric scoreboard shows that Berubé turned the quarter in less than 11 seconds. The gasoline-car drivers look at each other as if to say, What the fuck?
If a man with a high-powered rifle wandered into a primitive tribe where they'd been duking it out with wooden clubs, I imagine the reaction would be the same. The technology gap is so extreme, it makes the whole game seem pointless. After Berubé returns to the waiting area, a few drivers wander over and check his car with hard, calculating eyes; but most try to pretend that it doesn't exist. "Sure would be embarrassing to get my doors blown off by that thang," one kid mutters.
The next day - Saturday - the gas-guzzlers are gone and the pit area is invaded by smart, hairy geeks swigging Evian water and chattering jargon like speed freaks. Every one of them is male, except for some wives and girlfriends. Yes, the electronerds are here - and the bleachers are empty. The event was listed in the track's calendar, but the locals have chosen to stay home.
Still, there's no shortage of cars and drivers. Roderick Wilde's Maniac Mazda RX7 is a fearsome creation, crammed full of batteries and looking slightly beat-up, like a prize fighter with a history. John Wayland has brought his White Zombie, cranked to a higher voltage and plastered with slogans: "We blow things up so you don't have to ... Question internal combustion ... Plasma Boy Racing." Wayland got his "Plasma Boy" appellation a few years back when he shorted out some batteries with a carelessly dropped wrench. The explosion generated a terrifying ball of blue plasma crackling with electric discharges.
Not far away, Don Crabtree, a sewing-machine design engineer, stands by his record-breaking 144-volt motorcycle powered by wheelchair batteries. "This was the quickest thing we could throw together to get down here and play," he says. "It cost me about $300."
I wander over to a red Toyota MR2, as shiny as if it just came out of a showroom. Its owner is Bob Boyd, a white-haired Air Force veteran.
"Previously I built a Formula One racer," Boyd says, but he's talking about planes, not cars. "An international Formula One has to weigh at least 500 pounds," he explains. "Mine was the second fastest - but I'm tired of Formula One airplanes. This is more fun."
Boyd was shot down over Italy during World War II. He retired 24 years ago, but at 78, he still loves speed and, like most electric racers, is a self-taught engineer. "When I was a kid, out on a farm, you couldn't afford the two bits an hour to hire someone to do something for you. So, you learned to do it yourself. Kids who grow up around farms are pretty handy with tools."
He consulted John Wayland before tackling his project, then spent about 18 months working on it. "The winters are long in Idaho where I live, and you can only do so many crossword puzzles. So, I built this for fun. It draws up to 1,200 amps from 16 batteries, 192 volts. To recharge it, I just plug it into a standard 220-volt outlet."
Boyd's car is immaculately executed; the only clue that it's not a regular Toyota is the electric plug hiding where a gas filler pipe should be. Boyd financed the conversion without any sponsors. "When you get to be my age you've paid for everything already. I have probably $1,000 a month left over that I don't really need. So, I took a pretty nice car and tore it up, converted it. You could do the same thing a lot cheaper."
His maximum range is 40 miles between recharges, but he feels this is perfectly adequate. "Almost every family in the United States owns two or more cars, and most of them never drive more than 20 miles a day. Why don't they drive an electric? It's a whole bunch cheaper, like burning fuel at 14 cents a gallon. And of course it's nonpolluting."
"Less polluting" might be more accurate, because the electricity has to be generated somewhere. But the open combustion of coal or natural gas in power stations is inherently more efficient than an internal combustion engine, which creates noxious gases and a huge amount of waste heat. Also, as Boyd points out, hydroelectric power produces no pollutants at all. Therefore, electric vehicles really do have the potential to reduce emissions nationwide. Also, if millions of Americans went electric, existing power plants might still satisfy the demand, because most recharging would be done at night, when the load is lowest.
I question Boyd about the valuable metals locked up inside batteries. In response, he claims that the modern lead-acid batteries used in almost all amateur car conversions are 95 percent recyclable.
When I talk to other builders at the event, they give me the same well-practiced pro-electric sales pitch - and it's persuasive. Not all the vehicles are finished as meticulously as Boyd's, but most are good-looking and practical. They really could replace conventional automobiles under many everyday conditions.
Racing, though, may not be the killer app that the advocates are looking for. The cars move so silently, you can forget that anything's happening on the track. It's like an action movie with the sound turned off. Even when I walk to the far end where the cars hit terminal velocity, Berubé's dragster rolls past as unimpressively as a commuter train.
Up in the control tower, I ask the track owner which of his events attracts the biggest crowd. His answer is no surprise: Most people want to see insanely powerful, nitro-fueled monsters that shoot jets of flame out their pipes and make so much noise that you feel your internal organs vibrating in sympathy.
Electric-powered race cars have novelty value - maybe even shock value - among auto aficionados, but they remove fetish elements that are deeply embedded in car culture. When you suppress the animal growl of a hot rod and quench its stinking breath, you emasculate it - and the drama dies.
Electric dragsters seem unlikely to grab much airtime on ESPN. They can still serve an important function, though, because auto racing has always been a test bed for new technologies that eventually find their way into consumer products.
Roderick Wilde claims he once met a Ford engineer who had been sent by his company to check out EVs at racing events for the past several years, looking for adaptable ideas. In 1998 Wilde even received a call from Toyota for information about battery performance in cold climates. "Hot-rodders have always pushed the envelope," John Wayland agrees, "doing stuff that Detroit stylists and engineers never thought of. I certainly believe that the same thing can happen in electric vehicles."
One day, maybe; but not yet. Auto manufacturers lag far behind the amateurs in terms of performance, price, and practicality (see "Big Automakers vs. Backyard Mechanics," page 129), probably because the manufacturers don't believe a viable market for electric cars exists.
Toyota and General Motors have made the most serious investments, but Toyota spokesperson Jeremy Barnes freely admits that "we're not expecting to make a profit from EVs." So why is the company selling them? "Because of legislation," Barnes says. "And because it's the right thing to do for the environment," he adds quickly.
During the past decade GM has spent close to $700 million developing electric vehicles and others that use alternate power sources, including natural gas. But Jim Evans of GM's Advanced Technology Vehicles Division says, "We don't expect a return now. We're working on getting the cost curve down."
This is a bizarre situation. Amateurs are building affordable electrics, while huge corporations seem unwilling or unable to do so. The reason is simple: Manufacturers are obsessed with maximizing the distance an EV can travel between recharges.
According to Toyota's Barnes, "Our market research shows that the greatest concern of potential customers is range." Other EV advocates agree: The first thing anyone asks is usually, "How often do you need to plug it in?"
Batteries are the problem. Two gallons of gasoline weigh about 18 pounds and will take you 60 miles in a typical economy car, but you need 900 pounds of the most modern lead-acid batteries to achieve the same result. That's a 50-to-1 weight-ratio penalty.
Auto companies have used extreme measures to address this issue. GM's EV1 uses exotic composite materials and even titanium components to reduce weight. Its special tires minimize rolling resistance. Its AC motor is fractionally more efficient than the cheap DC units favored by amateurs, and its regenerative braking recharges the batteries when you slow down. These state-of-the-art options add a huge amount to the cost of the car, while increasing its range only to an average of 80 miles between recharges.
Toyota has followed a path that seems more practical at first glance yet still results in a vehicle that's too expensive to be profitable. Instead of spending millions perfecting an ultraefficient car, engineers simply put an electric motor into a preexisting sport-utility vehicle, the RAV4. But to overcome its high weight and wind resistance they installed nickel metal hydride (NiMH) batteries, which are insanely expensive. Toyota offers a replacement set for $20,000 but admits that this is a "subsidized" price. In other words, they're selling the batteries at a loss. The company won't say what the real cost is, but EV advocates guess that it could be $50,000, which is more than the sale price of the entire vehicle.
If that seems a bit extreme, consider this: Toyota has also developed a futuristic five-seater named the Prius, which contains a 1.5-liter gasoline engine in addition to its 30-kilowatt electric motor. This hybrid design, scheduled to be marketed in the United States in 2000, is claimed by the manufacturer to generate one-tenth the emissions while getting double the gas mileage. The electric motor contributes power for acceleration, while the gasoline engine recharges the batteries when the car cruises. This increases the claimed range to more than 800 miles - but the dual system adds cost, complexity, battery weight, and potential maintenance problems. No one believes it can be sold at a profit.
Overall, despite heroic efforts and a money-is-no-object attitude, manufacturers of pure EVs are still hampered by range limitations. So why not do what the amateurs have done: Admit that EVs are unsuitable for long distances, and design them within that limitation. After all, if you're contemplating a cross-country trip, it doesn't matter whether the range is 40, 80, or 120 miles; you're not going to use an electric vehicle.
For routine chores, electrics make sense. As Bob Boyd points out, in most two-car families, one car is used mainly for grocery shopping, commuting, or taking the kids to school, and a local range is probably adequate. The backyard builders have acknowledged this. As a result, their electrics need fewer batteries and are lighter, faster, more roomy, better-handling, and much, much cheaper.
John Wayland would like to see auto manufacturers offer something like a Dodge Neon fitted with the same simple type of DC motor and battery pack that the amateurs have been using. He figures that the empty shell of the car (which EVers call the "glider") probably costs about $6,000 to fabricate. "They could put in a motor and batteries, keep the same transaxle, and make a profit selling it for $20,000 or maybe less. People would buy it because it has no pollution, no vibration, better acceleration, less maintenance, and you don't have to go to the gas station. You know, people always say, 'Isn't it inconvenient to have to plug in your car?' Well, I think it's inconvenient to have to go out on a cold winter day, drive to a gas station, and pay a substantial amount of money to fill the tank."
Recharging is still an issue, because most EVs require a 240-volt power supply, which isn't easily available when you're on the road, and you have to wait an average of three hours to replenish totally dead batteries. In the future, however, this might change. A new generation of EVs could use 480 volts, which would enable much faster charging. In most areas of America, voltage is stepped down to 110 or 220 for domestic use via transformers on utility poles. But the power lines on those poles typically carry about 12,000 volts. Therefore, 480-volt outlets could be installed quite cheaply in gas stations, rest areas, motels, and truck stops. If you could recharge your car in 20 minutes - in the time it takes to eat a hamburger - EVs would begin to seem usable not just for local trips, but for long distance travel.
This is a far-fetched fantasy. Back here in reality, manufacturers have made their EVs so expensive to build, they seem to be trying to sell as few as possible. GM takes the prize in this respect by offering the EV1 only on a closed-end three-year lease to customers who satisfy onerous demographic criteria. Result: Only 550 EV1s are on the road so far.
When pressed to explain how the corporation will continue developing a car that defies commercial common sense, Jim Evans responds vaguely: "We're developing a family of products. It's really too early to determine whether electric or hybrid vehicles are going to play out." He does mention that the EV1 is being equipped with NiMH batteries - but this of course will make it even more expensive, while adding perhaps 50 miles to its range.
The amateurs, meanwhile, are out there pushing the limits of EVs in their own gung-ho fashion. Dennis Berubé has tweaked the performance of his dragster, establishing a new world record of 10.33 seconds for the quarter mile and a terminal speed of 123.47 mph. Meanwhile Roderick Wilde is planning the most extreme project yet: a car drawing at least 2,500 amps at 400 volts. That would be 1 megawatt, approximately equivalent to 1,000 net horsepower. The car will contain at least four motors, and Wilde claims that by the time you read this, a solid-state controller will be perfected to handle all that current. "We intend to go over 200 miles per hour," he says. "We'll take it to Bonneville and get it officially timed. It'll be the fastest street-legal electric car."
Street legal?
"Sure," says Wilde. "You can't have a 1,000-horsepower gasoline car on the street, because it couldn't satisfy emission regulations. But a 1,000-horsepower electric car generates no emissions. It can be legal. Of course they'll find some way to outlaw it sooner or later, because it's too potentially dangerous. I mean, even my Mazda is already insane on the street - if you nail it, you end up going sideways." He laughs happily.
John Wayland is cruising in a different direction. His next project is a tricked-out '66 Datsun minitruck with an electric motor mounted at the rear, leaving the front engine compartment empty. "I figure I'll put eight subwoofers in there with a transparent plexiglas top," he says. "That was my wife's idea: our version of a V-8. I'll have 1,000 watts of audio, from twin amplifiers powered by twin baby Optima batteries, recharged by twin DC-DC converters from the high-voltage battery stack located in the rear under a remote-controlled electric tilt bed. The paint job will be grape-jelly purple, with 17-inch wheels and LED sequential-flashing turn signals. I'm going to call it Purple Phaze."
Already, he has the custom license plates. They read "V8 BASS."
Outside his brick-and-lap-siding home, Wayland surveys his two electric cars, three electric pickup trucks, and one electric lawn tractor parked along his driveway and inside his garage - where shelves are packed with spare batteries, and racing trophies form a glittering shrine beside a toolbox and a drill press. All of the vehicles are immaculately clean and meticulously engineered. All are silent, economical, and nonpolluting. And all (except for the lawn tractor and a red pickup built more for range than speed) give you that kick in the ass when you press the pedal to the metal.
"I'm telling you in all seriousness," Wayland says, "we're going to change the face of electric cars."
He's been reciting this mantra for almost 20 years. But as other car builders become infected with his obsession, consumers just might begin to reconsider their obsession with range and start demanding electric cars that make sense.
If that actually happens, Wayland may turn out to be right.
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