Fingers point and mouths gape when the Impact, General Motors’ prototype electric car, glides by. Even blase New Yorkers stare at the futuristic coupe from sidewalks or crane their necks from their gasoline-powered cars. Ninety years ago, it must have been like this to drive a horseless carriage.
“How fast will it go?” they ask. “How far?” And, “How much?”
The answer to the first question is 80 miles an hour, limited by a computer. The answer to the second depends on how fast, but no farther than 90 miles. And as for price, GM isn’t saying.
It is lending the car to drivers around the country, ostensibly to gather data, but it still is arguing that today’s technology cannot produce an electric vehicle with wide appeal. GM is not sure it can sell a car with limited range and a charging time measurable in hours.
The Impact is GM’s prototype for the “zero-emission vehicle” that California, Massachusetts and New York are requiring all but the smallest carmakers to introduce by the 1998 model year. Electrics are supposed to account for 2 percent of cars offered for sale in those states, though lawsuits may change the deadline.
The car whets the appetite, but also tempers it. This is a nifty vehicle for most of the driving that most people do on most days-to work, to school, to the grocery store and the dry cleaners. It will go over the meadow and through the woods to Grandmother’s house, too, but it won’t come back unless Grandma is within 40 miles or has a few kilowatt-hours for a recharge.
Fifteen Impacts are on loan to drivers on Long Island, through the Long Island Lighting Co. The cars are on their fifth stop of a 12-city, two-year tour; next is New York City and Westchester County.
The striking car is impressive on the inside, too, and it is full of surprises. One is the way it accelerates; with the flat torque of an electric motor, it muscles its way over the road from the instant the accelerator is pressed. It covers 0 to 60 in 8.5 seconds, but that figure cannot convey how it can press the driver and passenger (it’s a two-seater) into their seats at the beginning of takeoff.
On the road, the quiet is punctuated by a collection of hard-to-identify sounds. They are, GM says, from the power steering and braking systems-noise that even the best-tuned gasoline engine drowns out.
The braking system also makes a series of little clicks. There are front disk brakes, hydraulically powered by a small electric pump (because there is no engine to which to connect a belt).
The rear brakes are electrically powered drums. But most of the deceleration comes from the motor. Pressing the brake pedal converts the motor to a generator, turning motion back into current.
Acceleration is quiet, a little like the Monorail at Disney World. The lack of vibration is relaxing.
The dashboard is not so relaxing, though. A digital meter there shows the remaining range, in bold blue characters. On a test drive, the meter was a pessimist. It is run by the car’s computer, which knows the approximate amount of electricity remaining, the rate at which it is being used at any instant and the habits of the driver’s right foot. It constantly recalculates the three to arrive at a predicted range.
In some ways, the Impact mimics conventional cars. A gearshift button lets the driver choose what will happen when the foot is removed from the accelerator. Set one way, the car continues at constant speed; set the other, it slows as if there were the braking of a conventional engine.
The Impact has distinctive features any car could use: what GM calls a “pedestrian friendly” horn, for example. If the driver tugs at the stem that controls the headlights when the car is in drive but moving at less than 15 miles an hour, the brights flash and the car gives a little toot.
The parking brake engages automatically when the shifter moves to park (essential in an electric, which has no transmission and cannot do what a conventional car does in park: line up the gears so the wheels can move only in opposite directions).
The car is different, too, in some small but disconcerting ways. There is only one key, a round one, and it works the doors and the trunk.
To start the car, the driver punches in a combination on a keypad. Even if you remember this when you get in the car, you still reflexively reach for the key when you want to stop and get out.
The lead-acid batteries store 17 kilowatt-hours, which would run a house for a day.
In New York the cost would be about $2.50; at the nation’s average electricity price it would be about $1.70-not bad for 70 to 90 miles of driving. If unleaded regular costs $1.15 a gallon, 80 miles would cost about $3.35 at 27.5 miles per gallon, the new-car average.
The car charges in two to three hours at 220 volts, the kind of circuit that runs an electric range. At 110 volts, normal house current, a full charge can take 10 hours.
