‘Black Dodge Neon’
courtesy of ‘yaybiscuits123’
WaPo brings us a story today about Michel Bonard, of Potomac, MD, who has converted an old Dodge Neon into an efficient electric car. It now requires him zero gallons of fuel to get around town! As long as that trip is under 30 miles (the capacity of the charge), he can silently roam around in this ultra-eco and economically friendly Neon. Michel completed the conversion in his own garage and is proving what a little know-how and ingenuity can do to solve some of the biggest problems facing us today (that would be the whole energy thing).
Although it cost about $15k in materials and took nearly 600 man hours for this initial conversion, Michel estimates he could do the next conversion in about 200 hours. The cost and time to turn your ride into a clean and efficient machine, not to mention the limited battery charge once it is built, are extremely prohibitive for the average driver. But look at it this way – if a retired engineer can do this by himself, the billions of dollars in research capabilities and thousands of smart automotive engineers at our huge auto companies can surely come up with something cheaper, faster and better. And I bet we won’t have to all drive Neons either!
That’s pretty awesome. The problem for us city dwellers though is that we don’t have garages to charge them in overnight. I’m sure electric cars will be pretty commonplace in 10 years. The other important factor will be to create clean energy to charge those batteries (e.g. wind, solar, ect).