eco tour 2011

On August 11, my son and I completed our summer-long trip across the US in our prototype human-electric hybrid vehicle. Over the course of 71 days, we traveled just over 4,200 miles while consuming about eight dollars in electricity (based on national average kW/hour rates), getting a good dose of exercise along the way as we pushed the pedals to lighten the engine’s load.

Before starting our summer-long crossing of the United States, I often described it as a coast-to-coast journey. After a couple of weeks on the road at an average of 15 mph, the nomenclature shifted to “cross-country journey,” as the process wasn’t so much about the oceans at either end as the thousands of miles in between.

The farther west we move on our cross-country odyssey, the greater the distance between towns and service stops grows. In the Eastern states, we would pass some sort of country store or gas station every few miles it seemed, and at the most, might have a 20 mile stretch between services. This changed as we moved into the Great Plains, where we hit 50-mile sections of road in Kansas with nothing but fields and scattered farm buildings.

There’s no denying that our unique vehicle draws a lot of attention. Drivers frequently slow as they pass to gawk or snap a photo; a stop inevitably draws onlookers with questions, comments and suggestions. One of the most common questions involves the drive system.

There are two challenges that pure electric vehicles will have to overcome before there's any chance of them gaining acceptance among the general driving public. One is range, and the other is recharge time. Each new generation of battery technology ups the power-to-weight ratio, giving mid-priced vehicles such as the Nissan Leaf a range of 70 to 80 miles, while cutting-edge products such as the Tesla Roadster are getter better than 200 miles on a charge. That’s plenty of range for around-town driving and mid-range errands, but hardly sufficient for a cross-country road trip.

As we continue to work our way west toward the Pacific, we move into states with lower population densities, and greater distances between towns. And, as we are learning, a dot on a map doesn’t necessarily indicate even the bare minimum social center with, you know, stores. On more than one occasion, we’ve rolled into a small farm town to find the businesses on Main Street boarded up, and only a smattering of occupied homes in what was once a thriving community.

In eastern Kansas, our route took us parallel to a major east-west train track for many miles. Long freight trains passed us every few minutes. My son Nash enjoyed the spectacle, and asserted that we were seeing a much more efficient mode of transportation than cars or trucks. He likely formed this opinion after seeing an ad campaign from one of the major rail lines that touted the efficiency of rail transport on a per mile/per ton basis. With hours of free time for discussion while rolling along at 15 mph, we spent some time debating the future of transportation.

On July 1, we passed the 2,000-mile mark on our cross-country road trip. For many of those miles, we’ve been playing leapfrog with a group of touring cyclists who are also following the trans-America route, which gives us some cause for comparison. Our vehicle does, after all, have a healthy dose of bicycle in its design.

When you drive cross-country, especially at the relatively slow speed of 15 mph, sooner or later you'll have to deal with some rain. For the first thousand miles of our journey, which carried us through Virginia and Kentucky, we managed to dodge or wait out most of the violent thunderstorms that swept the middle section of the country in June. Our luck ran out in southern Illinois, where we were subjected to 30-plus hours of persistent precipitation ranging from drizzle to deluge.

As we passed westward from the steep mountains of Kentucky's eastern section into the rolling hills of its bluegrass country, we finally stopped having to share the back roads with massive coal haulers. Instead, we found ourselves travelling alongside tractors, farm trucks and the occasional buggy. Western Kentucky is home to a population of Amish farmers, known for their throwback, simplistic lifestyle, which is most visibly evidenced (on the road, at least) by their shunning of automobiles in favor of horse-drawn carriages.

As with most prototype vehicles, we've had our share of design and mechanical problems. Fortunately, these challenges have--so far--not stopped us, but have slowed our progress, putting us three days behind our original projected schedule. Of course, as Dwight Eisenhower famously said, planning is everything, but plans are nothing.

The first line of western Virginia’s 3,000-plus-foot peaks presented our first real challenge of the 2001 Ecotour, just as they did to the early pioneers moving westward. (You can make your own connections.) Fortunately, instead of having to slash our way over rhododendron-covered slopes, we could gear down and inch upward on paved roads.