Free Living Like Ed by Jr. Ed Begley Page A

pump into the tank.
    Here’s why. You’re usually not driving across the plains of Nebraska. If you live in a city like L.A., there’s constant stop-and-go traffic. You sit at the stoplight or the stop sign, waiting for people to cross the street. All the while, your car needs gas to keep it humming—even though you’re not going anywhere.
    With a hybrid or electric car, the minute you take your foot off the accelerator, you’re using zero amps. Zippo. You may have your air conditioner on or your CD player or your lights, but these use very little power. The big demand on the car—the motor—is using no power when you’re stopped, and that’s a
big
efficiency.
    Convinced?

    AN ELECTRIC CAR’S RANGE
    Now, I can’t go everywhere with my electric car, for the simple reason that it can only go so far on a single charge. The range of my last electric car, a Toyota RAV4 EV, was 80 miles under average driving conditions. And that was round-trip—unless I had plenty of time and a charger on the other end (because it can take up to 8 hours to charge an electric vehicle’s battery from empty to full).
    Practically, I could only go 40 miles each way in that car. That was enough to get me to most places I would normally drive. For example, it’s a 17-mile drive to Los Angeles International Airport. The other end of the Valley, Chatsworth, is also about 17 miles away. Hollywood is just 7 miles away. Downtown is 13 miles away. Acton, where I often had to go for film shoots, was 38 miles each way. I could make it there and back, but I couldn’t go any farther. If there was roadwork and I had to make a detour, I’d end up charging somewhere.
    So yes, an electric vehicle’s finite range is somewhat of a limitation, but it has increased dramatically since my very first electric car, which could go only 15 miles between charges. And battery technology continues to improve. Today, many companies are focused on increasing the amount of energy that can be stored in ever smaller, ever more durable batteries—even batteries that use greener materials. On the one hand, it’s part of an ongoing trend toward miniaturization—things like computers and radios and calculators and cell phones getting ever smaller. And it’s also part of an ongoing trend toward better, smarter batteries that can hold more energy and that don’t need to be fully charged—and fully discharged—each time you use them. You’ve seen improvements like these in your cell phone batteries, digital camera batteries, and laptop computer batteries. Those advances in battery technology mean electric vehicles’ range will no doubt get even better in coming years.

                      So what’s it like to drive an electric car? You turn it on and you hear nothing. It’s a go-kart. It’s very quiet. You get accustomed to the sound of a gasoline engine, so when you turn on the electric car and it just goes
click,
you wonder, “Is it on?” Many times, when we’ve left the car with the valet, they go
click, click, click,
and try to make that
vroom
sound. When we get our car back they say, “It’s broken!” You have to be extravigilant about pedestrians because they can’t hear you coming—there’s no indicator—no beep, beep, beep. That’s the danger of it. But it goes fast. I like it. It’s fun.
    And I’m all for Ed’s new electric car. It’s great. The only downside is how far you can go on a charge.
    A QUICK HISTORY
    Some people think electric vehicles are a new idea, but they’ve been around for centuries. A Scotsman named Robert Anderson invented the first crude electric carriage powered by a nonrechargeable type of battery between 1832 and 1839. Thomas Davenport is credited with building the first practical electric vehicle—not a horseless carriage, but a locomotive—in 1835. Jump ahead to 1891, and William Morrison of Des Moines, Iowa, built the first successful electric car in the United States.
    Recently, I got to ride