I’m speaking with Tom Gocze, Maine’s home improvement guru from television’s Hot & Cold. He also has a call-in talk radio program on WVOM, 103.9 FM on Saturday mornings from 7 to 10 AM. Tom also happens to be a long-time electric vehicle aficionado.
EVMaine: Thanks Tom for talking with EVMaine today. Tell us a little about how you got started with electric vehicles.
Tom: Well, it was in the 1970’s when we had the first gas crunch. I remember there was a lot of press about electric vehicles, but there really wasn’t much available. I bought a couple of books and that’s about as far as my interest went at that time. I read the books and thought that they were way too complicated for me to afford to do anything. Then we fast forward about fifteen years and I found one online, I guess, from a guy down in Massachusetts for I forget how much, five hundred bucks I think. I probably lied about how much it was to my wife, but I think it was around five hundred dollars. The guy brought it up to Maine for another couple hundred. It was a Commutacar, which was a citicar, and it had been - the motor was there but it had no controls. I started to tinker with it and try a bunch of different ‘what if’ things and I got it running and got it registered and then burned the motor out which was a typical problem for those cars. I had the motor rebuilt, fiddled with it and kind of cut my teeth on that vehicle. Then I bought another city car that I didn’t do anything with it was so rough, but I felt that if I had one I should have two. And then at some point Charlie MacArthur and I bought thirteen ELCars, which were also called Zagato Zeles. They were made in Italy. They were sold in this country as ELCars. They were the same vintage as the City Car, but they looked like a better engineered car, and they were in some ways. We got thirteen of them and we split ownership of them and I dug into them, got them running and got them on the road. And I have just been kind of winding my way down since then doing a lot of research on what was done a hundred years ago. It was elegantly simple and extremely well engineered and I think still puts to shame a lot of what we’re trying to do today. We have the luxury of better motors, we have electronics (which I’m not a huge fan of) and we certainly have better batteries. But back in the ‘80s they took Clara Ford’s Baker Electric out of Ford’s Dearborn Museum, put new batteries in it and ran it for 80 miles! Those are very smooth running cars, they didn’t go real fast. So there’s a lot to be learned from what was done before, and we, using the luxury of the new technology that we have, are just putting things together. I like to take things apart, and then put them together differently. Electric cars I like just because you don’t get real dirty. You don’t have to know a lot, you have to understand electricity, but I understand electricity better than I understand the internal combustion engine.
EVMaine: Did you have any difficulty registering these vehicles?
Tom: Yeah, nightmares. I’ve had some electric vehicles they wouldn’t register. Fortunately, I have a little bit of name recognition so when I send an email to the Secretary of State and copy it to the Governor… I got a phone call back from the Secretary of State’s office, a very nice lady, and we sorted it out. It took about two or three weeks, I wasn’t upset, I knew we could make it work. People aren’t necessarily alien to the idea of electric vehicles, they just want to make sure that you’re not going to kill somebody or yourself in the process of driving one, and I understand that. Its not a Ford or a Chrysler or a GMC, its usually some oddball make nobody’s ever heard of where they only made fifty, so it gets a little challenging.
EVMaine: Did these vehicles have a VIN number on them?
Tom: They did. The one that I had the trouble with was the Gizmo, made by a company called NEVCO, the Neighborhood Electric Vehicle Company. They have since stopped producing them. That was a three wheeled vehicle, and they had never heard of them. They wouldn’t let me register them because they did not have handlebars so I could not register them as a motorcycle or a moped. Instead the Gizmo had two joysticks, one for each hand, and your hands moved the same way, but they were vertical instead of horizontal and they just had a real hard time with that, but we got it sorted out.
EVMaine: Can you recommend any insurance company around here that might be willing to insure an electric vehicle?
Tom: I had problems getting insurance. It’s very difficult to get insurance for electric cars. Finally you have to find a creative insurance agent who sometimes kind of stretches the truth a little. I found Allstate to be amenable. I had, to be quite honest, my regular insurance company State Farm which insures electric vehicles all over much of the rest of the Country, but they will not insure electric vehicles in Maine. They did for me initially, and then stopped, and its kind of funny because I’d never had an accident as a State Farm customer, and as an electric car owner I usually have the car taken apart more than I do have it on the road. They don’t go real fast, and maybe I put a couple hundred miles on a year. So its money found in the street for them. The underwriters, which are not the people here in Maine, the people here in Maine are quite amenable to wanting to insure it, but the underwriters wouldn’t do it. I bullied and cajoled and finally I found that Allstate has come up to the plate for me several times for different vehicles.
EVMaine: Since you had a VIN number on the vehicle what was the problem in registering it?
Tom: Well the big one was that they didn’t recognize the Gizmo as a motorcycle because it didn’t have handlebars, as I said. It’s a silly thing, but in a bureaucratic type situation I know enough people now in State government that I didn’t get upset the first time dealing with some lady at the BMV and she told me to call so-and-so in Augusta and I did, and then she said, “I think I’d better send an email and see if I just can’t work through this.” And I think most of these issues are workable. I think there’s a law that just passed recently that electric vehicles can be on lower-speed roads in the State. I think that’s a step forward. I’ve been very uncomfortable with some of my vehicles because I’m right here on Route One where the speed limit is 50-55. If I have a vehicle that does 35 or 40 I don’t want to have an accident on Route One. So I realized that and I didn’t drive some of my vehicles for a while, and then I realized that the Model T clubs in the summertime just drive in the breakdown lane. So I’d go down the road, and if I saw someone coming up behind me quickly I’d just pull over into the breakdown lane and let them pass me. They’d gawk, and then I’d pull back out onto the road again. Down in Searsport, of course, the speed limit is slow there anyway.
