EVMaine: Some of the new, electric three-wheeled vehicles have steering wheels. Do you think that will be a problem?
Tom: No, I don’t think so. I think it depends on who the manufacturer is, and if the State understands who they are, but there may be a little bit of an issue in just getting it done. It may not happen on the same day that you go into the BMV, or the town office. The town office down here in Searsport is a little easier than say, going to the BMV office in Bangor. You’ll have people qued up behind you waiting to register their cars, and we’re into an hour messing around, and the person’s on the phone with Augusta, so it gets a little challenging at times.
EVMaine: Do you think that registering an electric vehicle in Maine will get easier in the future when more electric cars get on the road?
Tom: Probably, I think it depends, of course, if it’s a three wheeled or a four wheeled vehicle. Four wheeled vehicles have to go through a lot more rigors to get a VIN number to be street legal. A three-wheeled vehicle is a great opportunity to have a lot of fun because you don’t have to jump through the same hoops as you do with the four-wheeled car.
EVMaine: Well, the electric vehicle would certainly pass an emissions test!
Tom: Yeah, yes, that’s the easy part. Although there are all these other issues that are related to lights, steering and a lot of the other safety features. I don’t think I had my three-wheelers inspected, and I guess I was supposed to. They let me register them as mopeds, which was kind of nice because I don’t have a motorcycle license.
EVMaine: What do you think of today’s hybrid vehicles, which are primarily a gasoline-powered car with an electric motor assist to improve their gas mileage?
Tom: I kind of like ‘em. We’ve done, I’ve test driven them for TV segments on them. I don’t like the complexity; it scares the hell out of me. I think the car makers like it because you’re not going to fix anything, very much of anything on that in your garage, yourself. Or take it to your mechanic, other than a dealer. And I’m very uncomfortable with that, I guess the Prius has twenty-some computers in it, and that’s unnerving. There’s a lot of cool aspects to these vehicles. I like the idea that there’s an electric water pump and electric power steering, but the overall complexity is ridiculous compared to a battery-powered electric vehicle, even a fancy electric vehicle like a Tesla Roadster. But if I want to get an economical internal combustion engine car I weigh in for the Smart Car, or in some kind of diesel that gets good mileage, that’s simple. I don’t like complexity. I’m a simple person, I want simple things.
EVMaine: What about plug-in hybrids? Some of the experiments have shown as much as 180 miles per gallon.
Tom: Yeah, but those are basically electric cars that kind of cheat a bit, and ah, I think it’s a great way to go. I guess I like the idea of a series hybrid, more than a parallel. I think both have potential. The electric vehicle that I have, that I’m using right now is a Chevy S-10 pickup. It’s electric and my fantasy is to put a generator on the back so its no big deal to recharge the batteries as it goes down the road, but the fantasy part comes in because I’d like to run a wood gas fire to run the generator, so then it becomes a stick-wood/electric hybrid vehicle, which I think is fun. I haven’t gone very far with that because basically I have to make a living in between. You know I think if you look at Jay Leno’s web site somewhere on there he’s got a hybrid electric from the 1920s. And it was a series setup, it had a gas motor that ran a generator, then it was a straight electric vehicle, and I forget the name of it, but it was a 1927 something. Its pretty cool. You know what’s nice about this 1927 vehicle is that there weren’t 20-something computers on there, so it was simple and it worked. Of course, that was at the wrong end of the electric car age, at a time when internal combustion engines were really coming into their own.
