Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 3, 1992 TAG: 9203030346
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Puttering along in the right lane of Peters Creek Road in the rolling cheese wedge, Hanson admits he wouldn't consider braving the interstate highway looming just over the rise.
"It might be illegal," he says. "It would definitely be suicidal."
Hanson's cheese/car is powered by 60 volts of electricity stored in 10 batteries. No carburetor, no spark plugs, no gasoline.
Every night, he runs an extension cord out of his North Roanoke County home and recharges his car. Every day, he drives the car six miles to work at Magnetic Bearings Inc. in the Valleypointe Corporate Center and six miles home.
Hanson, who rigged the car with a few experimental - but so far not very useful - solar panels, says he could drive 50 miles each day without recharging.
In fact, he plans to move to Botetourt County. It'll be 34 miles round-trip between his home and his job, and he's already tested his cheese-on-wheels. It ran out of juice on the way home, immediately in front of a car dealership.
"They tried to sell me a real car," he says. He wasn't buying. He rested the batteries for a spell and drove the rest of the way home.
Go ahead, laugh. It costs Hanson about 25 cents a day in electricity to run his car.
Tinkering with the electric car has become Hanson's passion. Such is the privilege of the bachelor electronics engineer.
His grandfather was an electrician, but his parents were "not very technical people," he says. Young Mark was fascinated early on with electricity.
"I guess I stuck a paper clip into an outlet and went POOF!" he says, laughing. "I wanted to know how that worked."
He restored old radios and televisions, bounced around to three colleges and moved from his childhood home of Maryland to Colorado.
A few years ago, Hanson spotted an elaborate planter in a front yard in Craig, Colo., festooned with flowering plants. It was an electric car, and its owner had tired of fiddling with it.
"The thing was a terrarium!" he says. "I felt kind of bad, so I bought it."
He paid $350.
It's a 1980 model, built on a golf cart chassis. It has two seats, both over the electric motor. It has a forward and a reverse switch on the dashboard, and every circuit bears Hanson's creative touch.
"I would never sell this car to someone - it's got all kinds of crazy experiments going on inside it," he says. "Most people aren't like us enthusiast nuts. The roof leaks and it moves slowly, and people blow me off the side of the road but I hang in there because it's electric."
There are, mind you, more comfortable, conventional electric cars. They do not all look like cheese.
And they are widely misunderstood.
Driving a car that looks like a chunk of Monterey jack, Hanson gets into a lot of conversations with strangers about electric cars.
Most complain that they move slowly, that they won't go long distances, and that they're too small.
"No doubt, the electric car is not a panacea," says Hanson. "It's designed for 80 percent of our driving - to the grocery store, to and from work. You wouldn't want to go on vacation and drive to the beach with it."
Even Hanson keeps a couple of "fossil-fuelers" - a motorcycle and a pickup truck - handy.
He says the Big Three car manufacturers - Chrysler, Ford and General Motors - are poised to once again get their hindquarters kicked by Japanese competition.
"The Big Three typically throw a few engineers out in the weeds, stuff a battery into a car and drive the car around for a while for the TV cameras and then get back to their real work," says Hanson. "Nissan is way ahead of them."
Perhaps it's understandable. The combustion engine is as much a part of the American experience as the pistol, the beef steak and "The Cosby Show."
Even Hanson drives his electrified cheese wedge less for financial or environmental reasons than for the pure love of dabbling in the circuitry.
He's noticed since moving here six months ago from Colorado that Roanokers are more curious about his wheels than Coloradoans ever were.
"Around here, you get a lot of exuberance," he says. "People want to see the car, they want to know about it."
Can it be grated and sprinkled over pasta? Is this cheese aged? And how many miles per kilowatt does it get?
by CNB