Last weekend I attended an electric car show. Organised by the Sydney branch of the Australian Electric Vehicle Association, it was unlike any other car show I’ve ever been to.

Why?

Well, firstly, the cars were different to 99 per cent of vehicles on the road. With the exception of a few current model Prius Toyotas, they were all home-converted battery electric vehicles. That’s right, (mostly) road-registered and street driven, these cars never visited petrol stations but instead needed only to be plugged into mains power.

Another thing rather different about the show was the interest being shown by visitors.

At a typical car sow you’ll get lots of lookers but few talkers. Here, every visitor had dozens of questions – and some even came equipped with notebooks and were writing down the answers. One guy had come all the way from Canberra and was actively seeking the information to enable him to have a car converted to electric power for his daily commute.

Others were asking about conversion costs, battery life, range, performance – and everything else you could imagine.

There was a constant buzz of interested conversation.

Along with the road-registered cars, there was also an electric kart, a half-built electric clubman and an electric motorbike. The road vehicles included a Camry wagon, Daihatsu Charade, Hyundai Excel, Daewoo Lanos and even a Mazda ute.

I was attending the show to gather material for some AutoSpeed stories, and got to drive three of the cars. We’ll be running these stories in due course, but in the mean time, if you’re at all interested in building your own battery electric car – or having a car converted to battery electric power – be aware that there’s a bunch of very enthusiastic and helpful people available to you as a resource.

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Arguably the biggest driver of car engine technology over the last 40 years has been exhaust emissions legislation.

The original Californian Clean Air legislation introduced in 1967 hastened the advent of electronic fuel injection (the pictured Bosch D-type system has just celebrated its 40th anniversary – and only 5 years after introduction, it was being used by 18 car manufacturers) and the march of clean emissions progress has barely slowed since.

These days, of course, the shift in focus has been from oxides of nitrogen and carbon monoxide to CO2 outputs.

But what actually are the standards causing so many engineers to pull out their hair? The laws rumoured to have lead to the foreshadowed demise of Ford’s Australian engine factory (more on Australian car manufacturing in an upcoming blog post) and which are making it so difficult to sell diesels in the US over the next few years? You’d think that getting a handle on all the laws would be damn’ near impossible – but that’s not so.

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The other month I found myself commuting 160 kilometres each day, most of that on two, three and four lane freeways. When everyone’s travelling at basically the same speed, it’s an ideal opportunity to look at the suspension behaviour of other cars. For several kilometres of bumps, you can literally eyeball from close quarters the front or rear wheels of a car travelling at 100 km/h.

One of the interesting things is watching the front dynamic camber variations. Theory says that you want a neg camber increase in bump, primarily to keep the outside, loaded tyre closer to vertical as the car rolls. But theory also says that this dynamic camber increase is pretty well impossible to achieve with MacPherson strut suspension, unless the steering axis inclination is radical (which in turn brings other problems).

And can’t you just see it in action when you watch adjoining cars!

On my local roads, the (pre VE) Commodores and nearly all Japanese and European small cars have front wheels that just move up and down. But watch a Falcon, or any of the European cars with double wishbones, and you can see clear dynamic camber variations.

And the same thing applies at the back, except this time the wheels just moving up and down are those connecting to torsion beam rear axles (FWD cars) or solid rear axles (RWD cars). On cars with multi-link or wishbone suspensions, the camber change is quite obvious to the eye. Of course I’m not talking about much variation – perhaps a few degrees. But you can still see it.

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I write this after completing two 750-kilometre drives, each done in a day. The occasion was the wedding of some friends, and the location was the Rydges resort at Yeppoon, on the coast near Rockhampton in Queensland. My wife and son flew up from the Gold Coast where we live; I decided to drive.

The car was my 1-litre, three cylinder hybrid Honda Insight. But isn’t that a long drive for a little car? Perhaps – but so what? There’s plenty of cabin space (in fact, with the seat adjusted correctly, my left foot can barely reach the firewall) and I don’t have any problems with driving a low-powered car on the open road. In this era of very powerful base model Australian cars, people tend to forget that safety on the highway is much more dependent on driving skill than the acceleration available under the right foot. I didn’t have any problems overtaking a few semi-trailers or climbing hills at the speed limit – and I saw lots of very powerful cars that had near misses, simply through appalling driving.

The only changes I made to the car for the trip were to inflate the tyres to 37 psi (hot) and fill the tank with 98 octane fuel. I think as a result of one or both of these, fuel economy was even better than standard. Well, it would have been if I hadn’t run the air con for about 80 per cent of the time….

After resetting the trip computer fuel economy display at home, my first stop (the petrol station to fill the tank) showed a fuel economy of 2.2 litres/100km (most of the trip to the petrol station is downhill), followed by 2.7 litres/100km at the Gateway Bridge and 3.2 litres/100km at Gympie. Following that, I turned on the air and the road also became hillier: the consumption average then steadily rose to 3.5 litres/100km where it stayed for the rest of the trip, including the full return journey.

As I have said many times before of this car: that’s world’s best fuel economy.

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