CHARGED AND READY TO GO
As gas prices continue to climb, many are now turning to electric vehicles to save cash and the environment
Imet him at the office so we could take his car to the restaurant. But when I climbed into his spiffy black sedan, I realized this was really about showing me his wheels.
Steve Zimmermann, president and CEO of a suburban Montreal manufacturer and a greenoholic, wanted to take me for a spin in his top-of-the-line Tesla, an all- electric, $100,000-plus touring sedan.
“I don’t want to scare you, but hold on,” said Zimmermann as he pushed the pedal to the floor. My head snapped back and in a little under five seconds, we were silently doing 100 kilometres an hour.
Left behind in the dust were my misconceptions about electric cars. The Tesla looks like any classy sedan, but has a motor the size of a watermelon, says Zimmermann, and luggage space fore and aft.
It’ll go 300 km on a charge and if you’re in a hurry, you can pull into a Tesla dealer and instead of a charge, they’ll simply drop the car’s battery pack and replace it in a couple of minutes, less time than it takes to fill up a tank with gas, he says.
Zimmermann says every time he gets behind the wheel, he gets a little jolt of feel good. “By far the best car I have ever owned. I have not had so much fun driving a car since I was in my 20s,” he says.
As gas prices climb and debates rage over pipelines and oil spills, more and more people are looking for alternates to pumping fossil fuels into their gas tanks.
Getting charged up on electric transport, however, is not limited to big-ticket four-wheel rides.
Tiffany Hobbis, a 37-year-old school bus driver from British Columbia, where she grew up with motorbikes, discovered Dyad electric motorbikes in a Montreal store.
She liked them so much, she bought three top-of-the-line models at about $1,700 each, sending one to her sister in B.C.
One of the draws of the Dyad, other than the fact it costs about 25 cents to fill the “tank” with electricity, is that it’s considered a bicycle in Quebec and you don’t need a licence, insurance or plates. The downside is its top speed is about 32 km/ hour on flat terrain with a range of 40 to 80 km, if you pedal.
“It’s extremely convenient to get around Montreal with all the construction and traffic and one-ways,” says Hobbis, though she admits she longs for a little more juice on busy boulevards and it feels less than perfectly steady when she runs over steel sewer grates in the rain.
Daniel Ma, who runs the Dyad store with his wife Joelle, says many of his customers are “green and young,” between 20 and 30, but Daniel Barrette, who’s been working for the city of Montreal for 25 years, says he likes the bikes because they’re silent.
“I hear noise all day,” he says as he wheels a rental Dyad out the door.
Ma says this business increases 20 per cent a year, fuelled by people who want to go green, travel cheap or who have lost their driver’s licence.
In Ottawa, Derand Sport in Orléans sells everything from electric bikes and scooters to three-wheel mobility scooters and pocket bikes.
And few proselytize electric more than Donald DeRouchie, whose brother André opened the store 32 years ago specializing in car audio systems.
The last 10 years, they’ve moved big time into electric bikes and scooters and haven’t looked back, with sales doubling every year, says Donald.
“The price of gas gets higher and higher and people’s salaries are not going up,” he says. His customers range from cost-conscious consumers to people with a short commute who see no point in having a car.
As well, he says the prices keep dropping and the quality keeps going up. And at this time of the year, manufacturers are dumping this year’s models at bargain prices and gearing up for improved models for next season.
He says for $800, you can get two wheels and an electric motor that will get you going up to 45 km/hr, depending on your weight and wind and road conditions, while $2,500 can get you a machine that will hit 55 km/hr with a range of 40 to 75 km.
Even the electric mobility scooters come in at thousands less than an electric wheelchair and make people feel less self conscious about their infirmity, he says. “Electric scooters and bikes are the biggest sellers,” adds André DeRouchie. “Since gas prices have gone up, people who bought brand new trucks are leaving them in the driveway.”