|
 Cars
of
Future Past
Bob
Beaumont had an idea he thought would change the world, but
he was 40 years too early. It was sometime in the mid-’60s
when Beaumont had the epiphany that led him to become the
largest manufacturer of electric cars in U.S. history. He
was pumping gas outside his Chrysler-Plymouth dealership in
Kingston, N.Y., saw the fumes from the gas hit the air, and
said to himself, “This is ridiculous.”
“I
thought, There’s got to be a better way than to pump this
stuff out of the ground and piss it away in gas tanks,” Beaumont
says, sitting at the kitchen table recently in his Columbia,
Md., home. “That thought stuck with me.”
It stuck with him long enough that, in 1968, he heard about
a guy making electric cars in Detroit out of converted Renaults.
Beaumont sold the dealership and headed west to join in, but
after eight or nine months, he lost faith in the project.
“I thought, This seems crazy, too.”
A golf-cart company in Georgia caught his eye. Club Car was
making electric golf carts that, Beaumont thought, could be
used on the streets with a few modifications. The company
built a few to his specifications, and the effort was enough
to interest a backer in Florida, who set Beaumont up with
a plant in Sebring, Fla. In 1974 the CitiCar began rolling
out of the factory, and Beaumont’s Sebring Vanguard Motors
became the sixth-largest car manufacturer in the country.
(It was a distant sixth: Sebring Vanguard produced some 2,600
CitiCars over three years, while No. 5, Checker, produced
almost twice as many in 1976 alone. AMC, the smallest of the
big four, made more than 200,000 cars that year.)
His creation was homely—a wedge-shaped contraption with plastic
panels on an aluminum roll cage that went around 26 mph and
got between 30 and 40 miles between charges—but his timing
was good. The 1973-’74 oil crisis had ended earlier that year,
and the idea of an electric car appealed to drivers who had
been through gas rationing and long lines at the pumps. The
CitiCar required an eight-hour charge, and the company offered
an optional extension cord to plug it in.
The Sebring plant was churning out as many as 10 CitiCars
a day, Beaumont says, with two guys on the road setting up
dealerships. They developed a truck that could carry 16 of
the little cars to the dealers, but once they were there,
they just sat—26 mph was too slow. (“People got tired of looking
in their rearview mirrors,” Beaumont says.) Vanguard recalled
the cars and added two batteries, making the top speed 38
mph. That made all the difference, and the cars started to
sell, at a cost of less than $3,000.
“Everybody
heard about what we were doing in Florida,” Beaumont remembers.
“And they came flocking to us like we were the salvation of
the world.”
Between 2,000 and 2,600 of the cars were sold; Beaumont remembers
the number as 2,206. “It seems like half of them are still
on the road,” he says, and he keeps in touch with the CitiCar
enthusiasts who occasionally seek him out. There are active
online owners’ communities for both cars, and Beaumont sells
copies of the out-of-print book on electric cars by Barbara
Taylor, The Lost Cord.
For a while, he says, things were going well, but in October
1975, the company was dealt a blow by Consumer Reports
magazine, which reviewed both the CitiCar and the ElCar, an
Italian competitor. The first paragraph of the article ends,
“We found major safety and operating problems,” and it goes
downhill fast from there. The CitiCar was “the noisiest vehicle
we have tested this year,” the magazine wrote. “Foolhardy
to drive . . . on any public road . . . acceleration was slow
. . . steering was very quick and unpredictable . . . braking
tests went no better . . . felt as if it had no springs at
all.” The closest the magazine could muster to a compliment
was, “Our CitiCar never left us completely stranded during
the time we owned it, although there were some anxious moments,”
and a tester’s diary ends, “Finally roll down driveway. Driver
and batteries both drained.”
“They
called our car everything but a suicide car,” Beaumont says.
“Unsafe this, that, and the other, because they were comparing
our 1,100-pound car to the big cars. All of the sudden everything
stopped. . . . That article basically pulled the plug on us.”
Beaumont tried to fight the perception that the cars were
unsafe. When the transportation department in Lansing, Mich.,
threatened to ban the cars, he boarded a plane with a baseball
bat and gave a demonstration of just what the car could take.
When he was done beating it up and the car showed no ill effects,
he says he offered to take his bat to a nearby Ford. The owner
declined, but the ban on CitiCar was lifted.
 Memories
of the gas crisis proved short, however, and rather than the
radical solution provided by the CitiCar, drivers turned to
cheap, fuel-efficient cars from Japan. That, coupled with
the safety issues outlined by Consumer Reports, proved
too much for the little CitiCar.
Financial backers disappeared, sales dried up. Eventually
the company followed suit, declaring bankruptcy in 1977. Beaumont
still maintains that the CitiCar was never meant to compete
with the larger, stronger gasoline vehicles of the day. It
was for short hops around town and commuting short distances
to and from work. He was creating an entirely new kind of
vehicle.
“Picture
a golf cart in your head,” he says. “Take that same golf cart,
increase the size of the motor, add a couple more batteries,
equip it with all the lights and things you need, and let
that car serve millions of people to go back and forth to
work. . . . I thought we’d flood the world with these things,
in Japan, where the congestion is terrible, in Indonesia,
in Europe. . . . I was convinced that this was the way to
go.
“I
still say, if there isn’t room for a little 1,000-pound or
1,100-pound CitiCar all over the world, then something’s got
to be wrong,” Beaumont says. “I was really pissed at the amount
of oil that we were just pissing away into the pumps. And
I still am. . . . I can’t believe how nobody’s done this.”
There have been attempts, mostly by hobbyists, to revive the
electric car. It is a technology, it seems, that is always
on the horizon. The 2006 documentary film Who Killed the
Electric Car? focused on General Motors’ EV1, popular
among the 800 people who leased the electric car from 1996
to ’99, but recalled and destroyed by the manufacturer. Some
of the technology from the EV1, according to the company,
will be incorporated into the Chevy Volt, an electric car
capable of using gasoline as an alternate power source, which
GM says will be out in 2010.
Beaumont had one more shot at his electric dream car, but
it came in the sleeker, sportier frame of the Tropica, a roadster
he produced with Renaissance Cars in Florida in the mid-1990s.
Jim Muir, who designed the CitiCar, did the styling for the
Tropica as well, but as Car and Driver magazine put
it in a fairly glowing 1994 review, “This time, instead of
milk cartons and doorstops, Muir looked for inspiration at
Dodge Vipers and Shelby Cobras. The shape of the car he created
is captivating.”
“It
was a beautiful car,” Beaumont says of the sleek and rounded
two-seater. “A real looker.”
 This
time the cars were more expensive (contemporary accounts vary
from $12,000 to $17,000), and Car and Driver’s test
model went 57 mph and lasted for 38 miles; later models claimed
a 60-to-80 mile range on an eight-hour charge. The cars had
no top but a waterproof interior. The magazine predicted a
market for the car as a fun runabout rather than a full-time
commuter. About two dozen of the cars were produced for showrooms,
but by 1995, according to the Orlando Sentinel, Renaissance
Cars stopped forecasting a delivery date. In ’96, it went
into receivership and was sold to a group of investors, who
continued under the name Zebra, then Xebra, before finally
folding quietly. Only 25 Tropicas were made, and fewer found
their way to the road. On July 17, a car advertised as “number
17 of 18” sold on eBay for $15,900. The Tropica, like the
CitiCar, has a devoted following.
Beaumont’s dream of a cheap electric car to serve millions
isn’t dead, although it may have come to him way too early.
In 1998, the National Highway Traffic Safety Board created
a category for low-speed vehicles, more commonly called Neighborhood
Electric Vehicles—basically a loophole that allows the use
of golf carts to run errands. The category allows for the
road use of a small, light vehicle with a maximum speed of
25 mph. The current largest manufacturer of electric cars,
India-based Reva, has sold around 2,500 cars, according to
a recent Automotive World article. The newest Revas
claim a top speed of 53 mph and a range of 80 miles (with
the air conditioner off). According to the company’s web site,
Reva is now testing the U.S. market.
The big U.S. manufacturers are also in the game: Sales of
gasoline-electric hybrids continue to climb, according to
the Green Car Congress, which tracks developments in alternative
vehicles, while sales of SUVs continue to fall, and Chevrolet
plans to introduce the Volt in 2010.
As for Beaumont, he has moved on. After the Tropica, he moved
to Maryland and operated a car dealership (selling gasoline-powered
cars). At 76, he uses an oxygen tube to help him breathe,
although it’s long enough to let him go out to the porch for
a smoke. He’s looking to the future, past the electric cars
someone else will build, toward solar energy. “When you think
about how much power hits the ground every day from the sun,”
he says, “it’s awesome.” Interest in alternative fuels comes
and goes with the rise and fall of gas prices, he says, but
he thinks it will take more. “Comes the day the oil begins
to trickle, then you’ll see a massive effort on the part of
government and industry to get the ball rolling on alternatives.
They say there’s a big effort right now, but I don’t know
if you can believe it.”
Of his own attempts, he calls them “One man’s effort to see
a mission through, and hope when I finished I would’ve made
an impact, a little impact, on the world.” He laughs. “The
only impact I’ve made is 25,000 hits on Yahoo, but at least
my little history will be there. . . . At 76, I’ve seen all
of it. And if you offered me $10 million, I wouldn’t do it
again”—he looks down at his cigarette, then hedges—”I don’t
think.”
Chris
Landers is a staff writer for Balti more City Paper,
where this story first appeared.
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