Love Affair with an Electric Sparrow
By Charlie Mac Arthur, aged 71
FIRST THE VERY GOOD NEWS!: I waited 30 years for this, and finally there I was, at about 66.5mph, tooling down the divided highway at Hollister, California, in the left hand lane ready to reverse course in a neat U-turn at the next crossover. I couldn't tell if the fields flashing by were planted in lettuce or garlic, maybe neither. How about artichokes then? I was in a brash little 990 pound high speed electric commuter's car…(or maybe it should be called an Electronic car) a pre-production Corbin-Pacific SPARROW. Like an agile aerobatic plane, the SPARROW is a superbly functional single seater with a baritone doorslam sound that produces Stradivarius tones from a million mile body. 83% of American commuters travel alone, and many are actually willing to admit they like it that way! Solitude is increasingly rare and precious in the cellophane/cellphone world. What the quiet monastery cell is for the meditating monk, this noiseless DC electric drive car for over-the-road commuting grants peace and solitude during daily travel time just as effectively for the business jock./jockette. So Harrah!.. for the single seat car! As a sexual trysting place it is a zero, but its baggage compartment can hold four bags of groceries for the hungry and/or a laptop for the compulsive. It also has a CD Player on which the driver might want to play something triumphantly appropriate, perhaps the RIDE OF THE VALKYRIES or THE STARS AND STRIPES FOREVER, the latter perhaps by a bagpipe marching band? That's for on the way going to work in the morning. Coming home in the evening taper down style music, Dvorak's NEW WORLD SYMPHONY, to de-stress as a soporific against domestic violence. A feisty little charged up SPARROW can leave home in the morning and drive cleverly as far as 60 miles in fender to fender echelons of traffic deep into the business combat zone. (The average commuter lives about 18 miles from the workplace) The SPARROW can fully and automatically refuel itself electrically in two to six hours, while idly parked, for a power cost of about a penny a mile! Twenty-five cents in a coin-op curbside charging box is chicken feed for the SPARROW motorist. Hey, that's only one dollar per hundred miles! We can't hardly START a lot of SUV's for a dollar! But why would a two-bit tight fisted employer want to give free energy? Maybe because his parking lots could hold four times as many commuters, and urban real estate "ain't cheap". Three, maybe four SPARROWS should take up no more parking space that a single four wheeled smogging gashog Tokyo /Detroit Rolling Siege Castle. And on the way to work the SPARROW can provide lots of anti-pollution benefits…No smog, No smell, No noise, No gas station stops for lube and tuneups, No oil drips along the concrete,. No smoking brake linings, No stops to pay Texaco a tribute to OPEC. No inching along inhaling invisible miasma in middle of the rusting herd, but instead whipping down the highway legally privileged in the Carpool lane, with a Transpass responder displayed in the windshield. (100% of seating capacity requirement fulfilled!). And after being first to arrive after a brief drive by-passing the gas crowd loners, the SPARROW gets the earlybird pick of the best places in the lot. The SPARROW driver might also save considerably on Tums or Mylanta in the glove box. Is it possible to gain a promotion just on the basis of appearing "bright eyed and bushy tailed", in before everyone else every day?
Back in those wonderous olden days three plain old garden variety 12 volt lead acid batteries had produced 3.5 million footpounds of work to make the ascent along the 8 mile road. It was a wonderful place for a neophyte to learn how to ride a motorcycle, great attention to detail motivated by the potential for sudden quarter mile losses of elevation off cliffs and the total lack of guard rails. (Safest road in the world? An aside: Do air bags/seat belts/daytime headlights encourage fearless conduct and actually foster casual accidents?). On level ground the 1974 Corbin bike was at its transportation best in a near-urban or urban setting, where its 45 mph top speed and 40 mile range made it more than adequate in blending with traffic. And surprisingly, its instant acceleration when a stop light turned green made it always first across the intersection and halfway down the next block before the smoggers had even moved. Wait for a better battery? Why? Like a teenager waits for improved sex? After the torture trial on the mountain, the badly brutalized batteries, exhausted several times over, still recovered for another couple of years of reliable commuting in a daily 30 mile round trip. Still later my son used the bike commuting to college, and also during the week around the campus. I still have the bike…wouldn't part with it for the world, but my wrinkled skin isn't as waterproof as it once was, so "I don't get around much anymore", I need a little more sheltering "car" than the younger man's gutsy "motorcycle". Now I am a summer cyclist only.
BUT NOW FOR SOME VERY BAD NEWS: Why care about electric power for the highway? Gasoline appears to be cheap, cheap, cheap. Never more plentiful. A gas station on every corner. Maybe because we don't know "how soon" (maybe already) the incredible treasure of "cheap and easy oil" will begin to shrink from limitless gushers to niggardly tricklers. Imagine, if you will, the universal Pains of Deprivation to be felt by the 75% of Americans who happen to be residential Urbanites (City Folks) during a permanent gas shortage. In the obscenely sprawled out city (Los Angeles for a worst case)…spectators, sports crazy for entertainment, how might 16, 000 ticket holders fair spending the day on muleback and the night in pup tents in order to watch two groups of genetically select tall guys running back and forth in what has become the necessarily dimmed candlelit semi-darkness? How long before $50 million player contracts suddenly cease, along with an entire industry, that of consolidated specatator sports at remote locations? Would they miss the crowd noise and hysteria essential to a real spectacle? We are "HydroCarbon Man" and rock juices which took 200 million years to make have also made us numerially possible. All the rock juice will be expended well shy of 200 years after its initial US exploitation in 1859. Next batch? Circa 200,001,859 AD, about a million human generations from now.
In the chart above the red bars above the line represent the history of all major world oil field discoveries during the 20th century. At recent rates of consumption the United States (all by itself) consumes one unit on this chart every 29 days. New oil fields used to last about 30 years from date of discovery….but not any more…with most of the big ones declining. Compounding our worry, the red bars below the base line represents another problem, the number of commerccial nuclear power plant to be closed each year, 109 in all, currently producing 22% of American electricity, with the last and final shutdown scheduled for 2034AD, By that date we can expect to have added 60,000,000 new customers to the demand! 60,000,000 more to share 22% less. That's trouble!. The lascivious orgasm of energy marches onward. The Alaska Pipeline peaked in production in 1988, and has diminished since. The USA's oil production peaked in the 1960's. World oil discoveries peaked in the mid 1960's. The first oil well in 1859's Pennsylvania struck black gold at 69.5 feet for under $1000 drilling cost. At first it was easily hand pumped to satisfy the American market with just one well! A recent oil platform out in the north Atlantic's iceberg lanes off Newfoundland has to go down miles to find oil….and it cost $4.2 billion to put that single sucker out there. Only over-consumption can produce the cash to pay for that sort of exploitation. Where else does increasing scarcity of the irreplacable drive the price down? "Modern Agriculture is the use of land in converting petroleum into food" according to E. F Watt. A single gallon of tractor fuel takes the place of 118 man hours grubbing in the fields on hands and knees. OPEC's rock juice power's the engines which pump reluctant spring water out of the Ogalala acquifer deep below our MidWest, which makes irrigated America the Breadbasket for not only the world…but itself as well. Oil and water wells are sinking synchronously. Saddam Hussein controls forty years of oil reserves as yet unpumped. But we have something he hasn't…the world's largest pool of consumers. He can't get along without us. He better not be in charge there when our last oil well dries up, both parties being dumb enough to burn up anything that is left fighting over it.. And if he is still provocatively in charge, how many sailors at the oars will we need to row an aircraft carrier up to the speed needed to launch aircraft…and how will we launch the gliders carrying bombs?…with truck inner tubes made into a sling shots? Ah, Glorious Rock Juice, the Sine Qua Non….without which we are nothing in the world power business. Unless we develop a 5 watt computer with a wooden or leasther case, will Bill Gates lose everything too, to toil with the rest of us, dressed in a goat skin toga and straw sandals, but no underwear? And without oil for our chainsaws, will the toilet paper industry survive? Should it have been the temptation of Oil rather than of Apples that God warned Adam and Eve to resist? The Hydro-Carbon Man who carelessly fell from the highest floor of the World Trade Center was heard to remark, on passing the second floor and plummeting downward, with ever increasing speed and confidence, "Well, I'm OK so far!" "Alternatives, anyone?", asks the messanger, trembling inside a bullet-proof vest. "Naw…I'm OK so far!" |
This wasn't my first electric vehicle experience. A quarter century back in 1974 I acquired serial #1 electric motorcycle from the same super-innovator, Mike Corbin. I didn't know much about destructive testing so I took it to Mt. Washington in New Hampshire's White Mountains and forced it to carry me up to the summit of the east's lofty equivalent of Pike's Peak. It took three well spent hours (what a hell of a view!) to get to the top. A passing observatory staff member took my camera to snap this picture of me and my machine, anonymously triumphant and un-Guinessed..
This web page was last modified on April 1999