This car is sporty first, electric last

Pioneer has plans for latest big project

Gary Starr knows most people think electric cars are glorified golf carts.

That's why his newest project is a car that would look more at home on the race course at Sears Point than the links at Peacock Gap.

Starr, who has been called the Henry Ford of electric vehicles, recently left one of the most successful electric vehicle companies in the world to try to sell the motoring public on a sports car that doesn't rumble when it rolls.

"It had to be fun and sexy." Starr said. "Electric vehicles have a bad reputation for being ugly and slow, so we wanted this one to be beautiful and sporty."

With it's Porsche Speedster styling and it's mide wheels, the Tropica attracts stares and even spontaneous exclamations of admiration at stop signs.

The Tropica will sell for about $15,000. Neuhaus said other electric cars of the same class sell for $30,000 and up.

Starr left Sebastopol-based U.S. Electricar earlier this year because he "was no longer having fun," he said. The fast growing company employs 300 people in the manufacture of fleet vehicles for utilities, municipalities, and other large organizations.

Starr, who founded the company in 1983, said U.S. Electricar's strategy of concentrating on fleet vehicles makes good business sense, but his lifelong dream is to build an electric car for the masses.

"The Tropica will do for the electric automobile industry what the Model T did for the gas automobile industry," Starr predicted.

Plug-in Power 'It had to be fun and sexy,' Mark Neuhaus said of electric car he's promoting for common driver.

The car will be manufactured in Palm Bay, Fla. by Renaissance Cars, Inc. Starr sits on it's board of directors, runs it's West Coast business development office and serves as a technical consultant for the company.

Renaissance has a backlog of orders for the Tropica, which is still in the prototype design stage. An initial production of 2,600 cars is planned for this fall.

Mark Neuhaus, an investor in the company, said the car is a sure-fire hit.

"This is the right car at the right time at the right price," said Neuhaus, who drives the Tropica daily to his office at Stone house Investments in Santa Rosa.

It accelerates as well as its gasoline guzzling counterparts, but top speed is only about 60 mph, and with its current battery setup, range between charging is only about 62 miles.

The car takes about eight hours to completely recharge, although an 80 percent charge only takes 90 minutes. It recharges at an ordinary household electrical outlet.

The fiberglass-body Tropica uses an array of ordinary lead-acid batteries.

Starr said the car could easily be modified to use other kinds of batteries as new technologies become available.

Since the twin independant electric motors aren't turning when the car stops, the car is eerily silent when sitting at idle. The car has no transmission, no drive train, and no steering column.

"Because it's a purpose built electric vehicle, we can do away with some things gasoline vehicles use," Starr said. "This makes the car simpler and less expensive."

Starr is hoping that state mandates that require increasing quotas of electric vehicles will jump-start interest in the Tropica. In 1988, 2 percent of all cars sold in California must be electric.

"The mandate is important, because it's making it possible." Starr said. "but the momentum is already there, because public interest in electric vehicles is definitely on the rise."

That public interest translates into real dollars before the first production Tropica rolls off the assembly line: Prospective buyers are now ponying up $100 each just to get on a waiting list, and car dealers nation-wide are signing up to sell the cars.

The car's designer, Jim Muir, formerly helped design the Grumman F-14 jet fighter and a series on open-ocean cigarette racing boats, so he brought technologies from the aerospace and aeronautic industries to the Tropica, Starr said.

"That's why Detroit will never be able to build a good electric car, because they're metalheads."

"This is the next generation. It's a computer on wheels."