fictional story I wrote about an electric drag car (long)

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I put this together after learing about "White Zombie" An amazing 1972 electric Datsun that does 11 seconds in the quarter mile. Don't let anybody tell you that electric transit is slow!




Electric car vindication

So, here you are, it’s the late eighties, and you are in high school, and you are the quinsential geek of the school, getting good grades, taking electronics, and in the AV support staff of the school. The closest you get to the popular kids is running the PA system at football games and pep rallies. Now, you’ve just gotten your driver’s license, but you don’t have a car.

Most of the kids are driving around grandmas old Impala, Buick Roadmaster, or Plymouth Satellite…big huge cars with big engines. If you came from the country, you might be driving a big old pickup truck, but if your family was rich, your parents probably got you a brand new Mustang 5.0, or a Camaro IROC-Z. You, on the other hand were given your mom’s old Japanese hatchback. You are grateful of your mom giving you her old car, but nothing more could bolster your membership into high school geekdom more than a tiny Japanese car!

You drive it into the student parking lot the first day you have it. Over the noise of rumbling big-blocks and glasspack pipes, you hear the others making comments like “Hope you fed your squirrels enough to get back home this afternoon!” Some of the girls make comments like “That’s a cute car, how many box tops did you save to get it?”
Still, driving this little geek car and was better than riding the big yellow cheese.

You hopelessly check out performance magazines and used car ad’s. There are only two solutions to rid yourself of the ridicule of this geeky vehicle. You could first try and hop it up with performance parts, but remember, this is the late eighties, and very few companies sold performance parts for Japanese cars then, and the parts that were out there were well above your meager high-school budget…so you just had stick it out.

Well, here you are, 17 years later and you run your own audiovisual systems company. You are up there with the best, making good money and living life comfortably, but that vexing issue still sits in your driveway. Sure, you’ve bought a work truck for your job, but you still got that little Japanese hatchback sitting in the driveway that embarrassed you so much in high school. Yep, you appreciate it more now because it gets 50 miles to the gallon, and it’s so ragged out that you don’t care about it getting scratched in the parking lot, or getting rock salt all over it on a snowy day.

Still, that feeling of revenge against those popular kids in high school with the big block cars still sit in the back of your head as you look at that tiny little car sitting there…what could you do. Well, it’s 2007, and all the things that made you an outcast back then are now popular and “in” with the hip crowd like computers, glasses, and yes, even Japanese cars! Now that you’ve got a good job, you could really afford some cool performance parts for this little machine, especially now that Japanese car performance parts are all over the place! This car could really turn into a serious musclecar killer, and you could vindicate yourself against all those popular kids in high school.

Still, you see those Japanese rice rockets all the kids are driving, and think they are sort of silly looking and they sound stupid, like someone who ate too much at a Mexican restaurant. You want to make a real sleeper, something that will really be embarrassing to loose against. So, you turn to a geek’s best friend…electricity! The first thing that comes to your mind is those huge locomotives pulling freight trains. They are electric, and probably have thousands of horsepower. I would only need a few hundred…this car is pretty light.

So, you get an idea in your head, and head down the street to talk to a buddy that works as an elevator technician to see what kind of motors he could come up with. “You got any leads on some good DC traction motors?” you ask him. “Sure, I’ll bring a couple of old ones by we pulled out of a building” he says. The next day, he stops by the house with the the motors. They are small and lightweight, and he carries them in himself. You think to yourself that these couldn’t possibly be strong enough to move an automobile, but they lifted an entire elevator car that probably weighs more. These put out about around 200 horsepower, maybe more, depending on how you wire ‘em up. Amazing! They are so small, so lightweight. I couldn’t begin to lift a 200 HP gasoline engine with my own arms.

Out goes the gasoline engine, and all the parts associated with it. In go the elevator motors after extensive fabrications of mounts and brackets. Now, what to do about powering it? Well, help from another buddy comes along. He maintains cellular phone towers, and has stacks of backup batteries that were rotated out of service…those ought to be good to power an electric car, and he will probably be glad to get rid of them too! You equip the dashboard of this car with an ammeter, voltmeter along with other electrical gauges and it now looks like the control panel in a mad scientist lap, not an automobile.

Months later, your meager little Japanese hatchback has been transformed, and it’s ready for the street. You first run by DMV and get plates for your vehicle. You can get the “clean vehicle” plates for your ride since it doesn’t burn fuel, then it’s off to the mechanic for a state inspection sticker. The first time out of the yard with the car is an odd experience…it’s almost completely silent. A few thoughts run through your head…how long will the batteries last, how will I heat it during the winter? How fast is this thing really going to be? That last question is quickly answered as you drop the pedal and pull away from a traffic signal with an amazing gust of acceleration leaving all the other traffic well behind you!

Well, it’s the first night out at the strip for your little machine. You know it’s fast, because nobody can catch you around town, but how fast is it really? You gotta race somebody, after all, it’s a drag race, so you look over the lot not for the fastest looking car, but the flashiest, loudest ego hauling musclecar you can find and pick that person to race you. He laughs you off thinking you couldn’t be serious about running your glorified golf-cart against his thundering machine, but you insist.

It’s now your turn, and you pull up to the staging area to warm up your tires. His huge monster of a machine roars in fury as he smokes up his tires. You put on quite a display yourself, but are still a bit apprehensive. His engine is deafening, and it shakes your insides, flames pit out of the side pipes…this car you are racing definitely has power, and he shows it by revving up at the starting line. “Are you sure you wanna go through with this?” He says over the rumbling of his engine. You reach over and turn on the stereo and pump up some techno music…you’ve got more than enough power with a back seat full of gell-cell batteries to answer his question! The crowd is at their feet…this couldn’t be happening!

The light turns green and you are off. The power of 25 gell cell batteries is turned loose into those elevator motors, and they do what they love to do best…lift things! Your head is thrown back into the seat and the car’s front end lifts up as you stare into the sky with a chirp of the tires. The motors whir away smoothly as your front end comes back down and whisks the car forward gracefully and smoothly

What’s this? You look in your rear view mirror and see the headlights of that huge musclecar behind you…this thing really does work! That musclecar though has not lost yet…he kicks it into the next gear and begins to catch up to your doorhandles. Still, you got another trick up your sleeve…an instant re-wire at the flip of the switch! You throw a switch to connect your motors from series to parallel, and the car kicks back again chirping the tires like a shot of nitrous. You listen intensely as that big fire breathing machine gets quieter and quieter.

You speed through the trap at the end of the track with nothing but wind noise following you there, and a few moments later that big behemoth you were racing finally makes it down the track. As you drive your little electric beast back up the track you can hear the clapping and cheering. Behind you, you can see the big display screen with your time…wow! 12.5 seconds, that’s amazing! Back at the pits the driver I raced pulls his musclecar in behind me. With a dumfounded, scared look he says” I should be happy...this is the quickest my car’s run, and the first time it’s broken 100. You know your car pulls its front tires off the ground, right? I knew I was in trouble when you launched like that...the worse part, is that I’m going to have to tell my buddies that I got beat by a battery powered ricer!”