Zenn and the Art of Green Driving

Rick Mercer is bombing around the streets of St. Jerome, Quebec in a jaunty little hatchback, making driving sounds: Rrrrmmm! Brrrrr....! He finds it unsettling, eerie, to drive a car that doesn't make any noise at all, that operates in silence. As his passenger, Ian Clifford, remarks, driving down the street on a summer day with the windows open, you can listen to the birds singing.

This is the Zenn car. “Zenn” stands for Zero Emissions, No Noise. It's an electric car – clean, quiet, compact, cheap. The wave of the future. A real weapon against global warming.

“Remind me again, what did John Baird say the first time he took this for a test spin, the Environment Minister?” asks Mercer. Clifford laughs and shakes his head.

“John hasn't been in one.”

“Ah, hasn't been in one!” cries Mercer. “And the Minister of Transport?”

“Ditto,” says Clifford.

You can watch this revealing dialogue on YouTube. As The Economist recently noted, Canada is a world leader in manufacturing electric cars – and Canadian governments seem intent on throwing our lead away.

The Zenn is a Low Speed Vehicle (LSV) built in St. Jerome for a Toronto-based company headed by Ian Clifford – a graduate, incidentally, of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. An LSV is designed to operate on roads with speed limits of 50km/h. It can carry two passengers and a week's worth of groceries – in Mercer's case, 20 cases of beer and one box of cereal. It travels up to 80 km on a “tank” of electricity, which costs 32 cents. When it's “empty,” you plug it into the wall and let it recharge, just like a cell phone. A full recharge takes about four hours.

You won't be the terror of the freeways in this little bucket, but that's not what it's for. It's an urban vehicle, and it could make a remarkable impact on urban congestion and air quality. You could drive it all day on city errands and never run out of power. Plug it in at night and it's fully-charged in the morning. It costs about a penny a mile to operate – about one-tenth of the cost of a normal car. In the US, where they are approved for use in 44 states, Zenns sell for about $16,000.

So why can't I buy one?

Transport Canada is doubtful about the safety of LSVs, arguing that they would come off badly in a collision with a dump truck or a Hummer. Perhaps – but so would a motor scooter or a bicycle, both of which operate now on Canadian roads. In the US, where 45,000 LSVs are already operating, these micro-cars have had a zero death rate.

Rationally, it would be far better to ban the Hummer than the Zenn. After all, urban air pollution, mainly from vehicles, kills at least 5900 Canadians every year. The figure comes from Environment Canada – John Baird's department. But those slow, terrible, gasping deaths leave no gore on the asphalt – so somehow they don't count.

One could argue – people do – that in a province with electricity as dirty as Nova Scotia's, an electric car simply pushes the pollution farther upstream. The car doesn't pollute, but the power plant does. That's true, but the Zenn is still a vast improvement. One expert calculates that the average vehicle emits 0.23 kg of CO2 per kilometer. A Hummer emits almost twice as much (0.4) and a Prius less than half (0.1). Even in Nova Scotia, the net emission from a Zenn would be .07 – 30% less than a Prius.

Transport Canada wants LSVs restricted to “controlled areas” like golf clubs, campuses, parks and military bases. Happily, that decision isn't entirely up to them, because the provinces decide for themselves which vehicles can use provincial roads. One province, British Columbia, has already approved LSVs. Manitoba intends to. Nova Scotia could follow suit.

Will it? And if so, when?

Mike Balsom, an engineer with the Department of Transportation, says that the Zenn is one of several creative and surprising “emerging vehicles” – the TRX, the Dynasty Electric Car, the CanAm Spyder and others. The government is just developing a system for evaluating such novelties, which challenge the existing definition of a motor vehicle. And yes, the intense public interest in the Zenn “will force all jurisdictions to address the emergence of new vehicle technologies.” Including Nova Scotia.

So when will we see the Zenn in Halifax? Mike Balsom smiles. He is an engineer, not a prophet. Even if the car were approved tomorrow, the process would still take eight to 12 months. The earliest we could hope for would be early 2009.

Okay. I'll settle for that. But let's get cracking. The future is here already.

-- 30--

The Truly New Cars

If our family's 16-year-old Subaru resigned from duty today, I would go shopping for a gasoline/electric hybrid. There are plenty of models available today, mainly from Toyota, Honda, GM and Ford.

But I'd really like the old Subie to hang on long enough for me to replace it with a next-generation vehicle: a Tesla, say , or a Honda FCX Clarity or maybe a Chevrolet Volt. Or a tiny, all-electric Subaru R1e. These vehicles may not be familiar, but cars like them are coming soon to a carport near you – and, from an environmental viewpoint, the sooner the better.

The Tesla (www.teslamotors.com ) is a gorgeous roadster fuelled entirely by electricity. It goes from zero to 100 KPH in less than four seconds and gets the equivalent of 135 miles per gallon. Designed as a high-end sports car that's really fun to drive, it's named for Nikola Tesla, the inventor of the electric induction motor and of alternating-current power transmission. You can buy a Tesla now – this year's production is sold, but you can order a 2009 – provided that you live in the lower 48 US states, and are willing to pony up $98,000 for the base model.

Hmm. Maybe not a Tesla. What about the attractive Honda FCX Clarity sedan? () This one uses a fuel cell to transform hydrogen into electricity, which drives the car. The only emission is clean water, which drips out the tailpipe. Honda claims the car is ready for production, but it is currently being leased on a trial basis to a handful of households in Southern California – the only place in North America where hydrogen refuelling is fairly readily available. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has announced plans to create a “hydrogen highway” with hundreds of hydrogen stations spread across the state.

The availability of hydrogen will also govern the appeal of BMW's Hydrogen 7, a modified stock sedan which Jay Leno recently took for a 10-day test drive. () Unlike a hybrid or a fuel-cell car, the Hydrogen 7 has a normal internal combustion engine which burns hydrogen instead of gasoline. It drives just like a regular BMW 7, and its only emission is also water.

The Chevy Volt () is completely different. A sporty two-door, the Volt uses lithium-ion batteries to propel it up to 65 km a day. Almost 80% of Canadian commuters travel less than that distance daily, and the batteries can be recharged simply by plugging the car into a household outlet overnight. For longer trips, a small generator kicks in – and the generator can be powered by gasoline, biodiesel, ethanol, or even hydrogen fuel cells.

The Volt is a “concept vehicle,” not likely to appear in the showroom any time soon. But General Motors, its manufacturer, already has gasoline/electric hybrid versions of several models, and will soon be testing a fleet of 100 fuel-cell SUVs. Alas, those will only be available in New York, Washington and Los Angeles. So we won't be getting one of those, either.

And now Popular Mechanics reports on a new generation of diesel vehicles in Europe, where more than half of all passenger cars are diesel-powered. Volkswagen's Polo – only available in Europe, alas – can get up to 75 miles per gallon while producing even fewer emissions than Toyota's celebrated hybrid Prius. The secret of such performance is new low-sulphur diesel fuel, combined with advanced exhaust-scrubbing systems.

All the major carmakers say they'll be producing new clean-diesel vehicles within a couple of years, but most of them are likely to be light trucks and big cars, not fuel-misers like the Polo. One exception will be Volkswagen's diesel Jetta, a car I look forward to seeing.

I like diesels not only because they're simple, economical and efficient, but also because they can readily be modified to run on a variety of fuels, including some truly sustainable ones. Indeed, Rudolf Diesel originally designed his engine to run on vegetable oil. The Constant Reader may remember my friend Jamil Shariff, who drove from Montreal to Vancouver in a diesel Volkswagen fuelled by McDonald's french fry oil.

All of which substantiates Jay Leno's remark that the environmental problem is not so much the car as the fuel. An electric car running on batteries charged by the wind – or by a diesel generator burning methane derived from sewage – is something approaching a sustainable car.

And, as Tesla's marketing materials note, electricity is “the universal currency of energy,” which can be generated “from coal, solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear sources — or a combination of all of them.”

It's hard to believe that the next generation of automobiles could be fast, quiet, economical and clean. But wouldn't that be lovely?

-- 30 --