Cruising in a car with no gas

Sure I'd love to own one, any one. But five years short of the 21st century, the new cars fall way short of what I'd once expected them to be.

Think back to when you were a kid and drew your rendition of the space-car. Did the Personal Transport Module in your picture feature anti-skid brakes, coomputer-adjusted suspension and headlights that follow a curve in unison with the front wheels?

No way. To a futurist, that stuff is old-fashioned as wooden spokes. The car you drew didn't even have wheels.

It flew. Every fourth-grade cisionary this century has known that by the year 2000 cars are suppossed to rise silently off the ground and take off like a bullet on a laser-guided trajectory.

Kids will disagree about what fuels the people-mover, but no one was ever dorky enough to imagine it running on something so crude that it's pupmed out of the ground, spilled in shipwrecks, fought over and converted into carbon monoxide.

No, a whole bunch of us anticipated that by this time in history the family car would zip from San Francisco to L.A. on a teaspoon of sunshine. Small wonder that every '9 car from the Ford Escort to the Lexus SC400 is a letdown.

But I did drive a car this week that has the feel of the future.

SONOMA COUNTY'S GARY STARR, who got rich tinkering with clean-energy gadgets, let me drive the prototype of the 1995 Tropica. It doesn't fly, but neither does it leak oil or belch exhaust.

I don't think many of the people who saw me pilot the sexy two-door roadster down Fourth Street and up Mendocino guessed that it's electrical. But if they expected an explosive roar when I pulled away from a green light, they likely were supprised by the Tropica's smokeless hum.

The wind tussled my hair as a concealed bank of 12 lead-acid batteries powered the twin motors that independantly turn the rear wheels. I resisted the urge to see how quickly I could push the curvy, low-slung coupe it to it's top speed of about 60 mph.

Believe me, I'm not trying to sell you the car. Gary and partner Mark Neuhaus said you couldn't buy one today even if you wanted to because it's not yet in full production and dealers have begun waiting lists.

I mention the Tropica because its release later this year just might launch an era when ordinary people will stop talking about non-gasoline cars and start driving them. Forestville resident Starr thinks America is ready for an in-town car that fills up on about a buck's worth of electricity.

The battery-operated car "is no longer just a curiosity," he said. Given that Gary wasn't yet 30 when he became president of what is now U.S. Electricar, the Santa Rosa-based firm that fits fleet vehicles with electric motors and sells them to companies and governments around the world, I figure his opinion is worth something.

YOU MAY KNOW that Gary, now 38, is no longer with Electricar. He left the firm in June, largely because it focuses on producing industrial fleets of rechargeable buses, pickups, and cars and Gary prefers dealing with consumers.

When he took over Electricar's predecessor, Solar Electric Engineering, in 1983 it was a humble save-the-earth enterprise. It manufactured things like solar-powered beanies, radios, and attic fans.

Under Gary's direction the company got into ripping the guts from conventional cars and retrofitting them with electric motors and batteries. He usually had one on display when Solar Electric operated out of a storefront in Railroad Square.

Gary sold a couple hundred of the retrofits, but they remained a curiosity.

THESE DAYS HE and Mark work out of the old Stone House on Sonoma Highway as the West Coast arm of Florida's Renaissance Cars, maker of the Tropica. They seem convinced that the electric car is about to graduate from a novelty to something regular people will drive to work and to the store.

With both the federal and state governments demanding that a percentage of new cars emit no pollutants bu 1998, everybody from General Motors to college kids in garages is working to develop an affordable, production electric car that the consumers will actually want to own.

"We have a good head start" with the Tropica, Gary said. Mark said he figures Renaissance Cars is about two years ahead of the competition.

The car they're promoting makes no pretense of being able to replace a family's primary gas-burner.

"You can't get into it (the Tropica) and hop to L.A.," said Gary.

With a range of about 50 miles, the electric roadster is intended as the second car - or third - that stays in town. Gary and Mark said they think people will buy it because it's spiffy, fun to drive, non-polluting, and will cost $15,000 before government incentives thatinclude a 10 percent federal income tax-credit.

I especially liked the guilt-free feel as I pushed the accelerator and the environmentally accordant transport surged forward without emitting noise or exhaust. If only the baby could fly.