The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Electric vehicles have a reputation for being small, wimpy and unreliable, but don't tell that to Joe LeClerc. The Flin Flon native, now living in B.C., is among the few Canadians who has retrofitted a traditional vehicle to run solely on batteries. 'It has lots of torque and lots of power,' says LeClerc of his GMC Canyon pickup truck. Not that he ever doubted it would. For the dream of building his own electric vehicle is one LeClerc carried for more than two decades before getting the job done. It all started in 1990 when he was an instrument technician apprentice at Hudbay, then known as HBM&S. He took special notice of the electric motors that the company stored beside the instrument shop where he worked. With the first Gulf War raging and gas prices skyrocketing as a result, LeClerc pondered the feasibility of turning a gas-guzzler into a battery-drainer. It had to be possible. Years later, when he began surfing the Internet, he found that although it was uncommon, people were indeed converting their vehicles. Five years ago, now living in Prince George, B.C., LeClerc decided it was time to join them. He bought a repossessed 2005 GMC Canyon on the cheap, driving it with gasoline for the first few years as he plotted his ambitious retrofitting project. Out would come the gas-fired engine, fuel tank and exhaust system; in would go a 71-horsepower electric motor and a series of 34 China-made lithium iron phosphate batteries, each weighing a little over 10 pounds. On the dash LeClerc would mount a panel of gauges, including one to monitor his remaining battery power; below the existing temperature control switch, a button would turn on the heating system. Several Months In the summer of 2011, in his home garage, the mechanically inclined LeClerc launched into a project that would span several months and 120 hours of elbow grease. It would also require the help of some family members and friends, not to mention a significant injection of cash _ $25,000 to be exact. In February of 2012, with the truck 150 pounds heavier than its pre-conversion weight, LeClerc hit the road for the first time in his electric pickup. He still has the video of the milestone, complete with audio of the high-pitched _ yet surprisingly unannoying _ whine of the truck in motion. 'It's quiet,' LeClerc says. 'When you put the key in the ignition and turn it, it's on now, and then you just start accelerating and the acceleration is smooth.' Not quite a year and a half later, LeClerc has put 12,000 kilometres on the truck and seen firsthand how his five-figure investment was well spent. 'Because it doesn't have a muffler, it doesn't need oil changes, the maintenance costs are very low,' he explains. The other obvious saving is on gas. Whereas some electric vehicles have a gas option, LeClerc's truck is 100 per cent battery-powered. 'I used to spend $600 a month on fuel and now I'm down to about $100 just when we use our other (gas-powered) truck,' he says. LeClerc believes he will recoup his $25,000 cost in just four or five years, but even if he never does the project was so much fun that he would have a hard time regretting it. 'I love to build things,' says LeClerc, an instrument technician for Prince George's Canfor Pulp. Another motivator for LeClerc is the environmental benefits of taking one more fuel-burning vehicle off the road. 'There's no doubt about it that what's coming out of the tailpipe isn't good for you,' he says. 'You couldn't stay in a room full of exhaust fumes for very long before you'd succumb. So we're all breathing in these hydrocarbons coming out of tailpipes, and it's not good for us.' See 'Truck' on pg. Continued from pg. Yet LeClerc admits the truck has its limitations. Though it can hit speeds of over 120 kilometres an hour, it should be driven no more than 80 kilometres between charges. 'For a lot of people there's the range anxiety, where they say, 'Well, I can't use this for a big trip so I don't want one,'' he says. 'For me, 90 per cent of my driving in a year is just back and forth to work and around town.' LeClerc regularly fields questions about his truck and is happy to supply answers. He is in regular contact with other do-it-yourself retrofitters as a member of the highly informal Vancouver Electric Vehicle Association. He estimates there are just 100 retrofitted electric vehicles in all of B.C., and just a few thousand in North America. Unless they crave the challenge, LeClerc recommends drivers who want an electric vehicle buy one that was manufactured that way. In the coming years, he believes the roadways will be filled with an increasing number of such vehicles. 'They're probably going to be the vast majority of the vehicles on the road,' LeClerc says.
