Charging Ahead

Article Photos

"Can a type-A personality find happiness at 25 miles an hour if the gas bill is zero?" asks Buck Joiner, about himself. He doesn't know yet because the Division of Motor Vehicles is being sticky about titling his four - yes, count 'em, four - Chinese Flybo electric runabouts. But he's hopeful.

Joiner spent "hundreds and hundreds of hours" researching electric vehicles before lighting on the Flybo, and he's pleased with what he's got, although dealing with the county is enough to give him an infarction.

When he finally gets his Flybo - marketing has got to do something about that name - onto South Kihei Road, Joiner will be about as insulated from petroleum prices as anybody on Maui. His house at Maui Meadows runs off photovoltaic electricity, and now his car can, too.

In fact, if he gets a favorable response from the Public Utilities Commission, Joiner could be tooling around Kihei, at a sedate 25 mph, and making money off the fuel, although he's only hoping to break even.

It will work like this. During the day, Joiner sells photovoltaic electricity to Maui Electric Co. through a reverse metering arrangement. Nighttime, when the PV shuts down, would be the convenient time to recharge the six batteries in the Flybo, with MECO juice.

Right now, that's a wash, but if the PUC were to adopt time-of-day metering (it has a docket open on this topic), then Joiner could get more for the electricity he sells during the daytime than he would pay at night when he's buying. He doesn't really expect to turn a profit but he'd like to break even.

He's in the hole so far on his electric car adventure.

All Joiner wanted was to become an early adopter - "a very early adopter," he says - of electric vehicle technology. An engineer and tinkerer, Joiner considered buying an electric conversion kit for an old Triumph Spitfire he has. "It would have taken a year," he says.

He decided he'd rather buy something off the shelf, then spend the next year tinkering and testing. A Tesla was out of his price range, but what he really wanted was an Aptera. Unfortunately, that electric car is being sold only in Southern California for now.

At first glance, there seem to be lots of choices of electric vehicles, but Joiner found there's a lot of "vaporware" in the field.

One thing and another led him to the Flybo, which looks something like a Smart Car, and - most important - could actually be delivered.

Joiner wanted just one for himself but four will fit into a shipping container for the same transportation cost, so he shopped other local electric vehicle enthusiasts until he found one who agreed to buy three Flybos.

Joiner made the down payment and the Flybos were on their way. He neglected to clear this with his friend's wife, who vetoed the sale.

So now Joiner has three Flybos for sale, at $10,500 per. They are the only ones in the state and among very few in the United States outside of Sheboygan, Wis. The serial numbers are 91, 92, 93 and 94.

"It's an experimental car," he says, so although he needs to unload his Flybos, he says he won't sell to just anybody.

Would-be buyers "will have to be mechanically and electrically akamai," he says.

He has no intention of becoming a dealer and would have to jump over many regulatory hurdles if he did. Private citizens can import up to five cars before they have to jump.

What he does want to do is "try to be on the very crest of a wave in electric vehicles."

Electric cars, both professionally designed and garage-builts, have been around for a long time. MECO had an electric Ford Taurus a few years ago. I drove it around Kahului, and up to the 35 mph speed limit in Dream City it performed like a gas Ford only quieter. When Kimo Apana was mayor, he sometimes drove around in an electric GEM, which was a sort of golf cart on steroids.

Just going electric doesn't get you off oil, though. A hybrid produces zero emissions in electric drive but ultimately consumes petroleum. Even a pure electric consumes 85 percent petroleum (the fraction of MECO's generation that comes from oil), unless, like Joiner, you have your own alternative source of electricity.

The Flybo does not offer any advances technologically. The motor and controller are standard fare and the power is stored in six plain automotive batteries. Joiner is putting his hopes in new battery technology.

As soon as it becomes available, he plans to swap out the old batteries. He is hoping, perhaps by the end of the year, to be able to buy Firefly carbon sponge batteries. These are already in production but are sold only for 18-wheeler truck tractors.

His "holy grail" is the EEStor ultracapacitor technology, purportedly being developed by a very secretive company. But it promises 10 times the power with one-tenth the weight of lead-acid batteries, with a recharge time of four minutes and almost unlimited cycles.

Most important, in Joiner's view, is that both technologies make use of readily available materials.

The big auto manufacturers seem to be putting their research into lithium-ion batteries. Joiner expects that electric vehicles are in many of our futures, and "I don't believe there is enough lithium and cobalt in the world to meet the demand."

What he has now is something better than an elaborate golf cart, but not technically different.

A stock Flybo is supposed to be capable of 40 mph, but to qualify as a neighborhood vehicle under American registration laws, a governor to keep it down to 25 mph is required. Joiner figures that and the 100-mile range should suffice for 90 percent of his motoring, if he can stand the pace. He already has an electric bicycle and an electric scooter.

Now that he has his Flybos - and getting them out of the container was an unexpected adventure - he is inspecting and testing.

(He had invited friends and neighbors over for the delivery, which turned out to be fortunate. The Flybos were so tightly packed that it took many hands and two and a half hours to extract them from the shipping container.)

Joiner did not expect all amenities, and he expected and has found some quality issues. But overall, his Flybo is somewhat better than he expected. "I didn't expect electric windows," but he got them.

He did not expect, and did not get, antilock brakes or air conditioning. He thought it would not have a radio, but the Flybo is a work in progress at the factory, and it arrived with an AM-FM-CD player, though only one speaker.

Insurance turned out to be less of a problem than he anticipated. He called five companies for quotes and was turned down by all five, including AIG, which insures his other cars. A call to the vice president of marketing and a long e-mail got approval for insurance from AIG the next day, he says.

"There were a horrendous number of hurdles" to surmount before he could find an exporter, get customs clearances and the two hundred and one things it takes to import an unknown car from China.

"I sent 200 e-mails," says Joiner.

Not enough.

Although he has paperwork from the exporter, the county DMV office is insisting that he provide a notarized bill of sale from the manufacturer - in English.

"It's preposterous," says Joiner. "I don't know if they even have notaries in China."

Harry Eagar can be reached at heagar@mauinews.com.