This is awesome. "DIY Electric El Camino Is All Kinds of Awesome" "Leitschuh gets all his power from his wind turbine and 12-kW solar-barn, which he claims is the largest privately owned solar array in Wisconsin." DIY Electric El Camino Is All Kinds of Awesome | Autopia | Wired.com http://www.tdlelectronics.com/Barn/Barn Solar.html Click on this link! - then click on the "On The Go" tab (the picture of the gas pump), and a bunch of tips come up for saving energy, in a really cool presentation. http://www.jsonline.com/graphics/multimedia/media/dec07/brightideas/index.html .
The thread title is a bit misleading. Sort of like calling my Xebra "water powered" because my electricity comes from hydro. Darell does the same thing as this guy, except that his car is a production model and not a DIY. However, it's always good when one more person goes electric, and even better that he's getting his electricity from sustainable sources.
The author is wrong when he says the El Camino was based on the Caprice (the luxury version of Chevy's large-size Impala line). For almost its entire lifetime and all of its generations, the El Camino was based on the Chevelle/Malibu (Chevy's mid-size line). Pretty big mistake for a journalist to make, especially one who writes about autos.
The mass media are surprisingly unreliable. Read an article almost anywhere, on a subject about which you are knowledgeable, and you will find mistakes. There was an article about me once in the paper. It mentioned my age. Two years later the same paper had another article about me. It gave me the same age. The reporter had looked me up in their files and neglected to factor in the two years that had passed in the mean time. Pretty stupid mistake. Most reporters learn how to write. Few of them learn how to think.
Just as importantly, he's found a way to preserve a piece of American automobile history without trying to find fuel for a big block V8. Sure, to truly preserve history, he would keep the V8 in it and keep it in an air-tight chamber 360 days out of the year and only drive it five days. But since this man wants this car to be his daily driver, he needed to adapt it in order to survive (especially when gasoline eventually goes back up to $5 per gallon).
JMHO, but I don't think that "preserving a piece of American history" in driving condition is just as important as leading the way to a sustainable-energy future. Those monstrosities may bring a tear of nostalgia to the eye of someone who had his first sexual encounter in one, but all they remind me of is gasoline fumes and carsickness. Yes, converted to electricity they are acceptable, and even useful to those who need the automotive space. But to my mind they are just plain ugly. There's a movie, I think it might be Grindhouse: Deathproof, in which Zoe Bell and friends demolish one of those old classic cars, a borrowed one, I might add. In the movie, Bell, a real-life stunt player, plays herself, as a young woman who wants to ride on the hood of this classic car at top speed. A psycho turns up and tries to kill her by bumping their car with his own. Great movie. One less gas-guzzling monstrosity on the road? Fine by me. Very satisfying ending, also
+1 The journalist might as well say the Ranchero was based on the Pinto segway'ing back to the OP ... what's up with the 'do' on that guy in the picture? .
