EV Restoration Sets Teen on New Path; Illustrates Three Decades of Progress

EV Restoration Sets Teen on New Path; Illustrates Three Decades of Progress

By John O'Dell March 31, 2010

By John O'Dell, Senior Editor

Chad Conway was, from all accounts, a perfectly normal 16-year-old when it happened.

He had a girlfriend, played sports and wanted to build a hot muscle car for his first set of wheels - a project he proposed to a teacher at his Massachusetts high school that fateful day in 2005.

The only wrinkle in his otherwise ordinary teenage life was that even at 16, a time most guys' interests revolve around girls, fast cars, beer and how to pass math without attending classes, Conway was interested in a career in electrical engineering.

His engineering teacher knew that, and proposed something that piqued Conway's interest.

A Diehard

Instead of building a gas-gulping muscle car, would Conway be interested, he asked, in taking over a project the teacher had long ago abandoned - restoring a Comuta-Car; an early electric vehicle that's been out of production for more than a quarter of a century - since the move toward stricter automotive safety standards made it no longer economically feasible to build.

It may also have been a victim of its own unusual looks. The Comuta-Car, at least in the bright yellow paint that adorns Conway's 1980 model, looks like a giant wedge of cheese that would be more at home at a Green Bay Packers rally rather than on the highway.

It took Conway 18 months - pretty much ate up all of the spare time he otherwise would have had in his sophomore and junior years of high school and the summer in between - but he finished the restoration, with only a little bit of help from his dad and his engineering instructor, in time for his junior prom.

"The most difficult part", he said, "was figuring out the controller system for rewiring. I had to do a lot of experimenting and I blew up on the 12-volt batteries in my first testing."

It was a job, he says, that often challenged but ultimately cemented his choice of careers.  "It got me into electrical engineering. Before that I was a car guy pursuing mechanical engineering , but I really liked that I had to be so inventive with the electrics in the car."

It also made him a diehard EV booster.

Away From Oil

To this day the wedge-shaped Comuta-Car is the only vehicle Conway's owned.

He took his date to the junior prom in it in 2007 and the senior ball a year later. Now that he's enrolled as an electrical and mechanical engineering student at Indiana's Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, he has plans to bring it to Terra Haute as soon as he gets an apartment with a garage or carport where he can shelter it in the winter and hook up a charger to replenish its lead-acid batteries each night.

"It's the only car I've needed," he said. "It gets me where I need to go, costs almost nothing to run and the girls thought it was pretty cool. It also won the 'best ride' award at my junior prom."

Beyond the "cool" factor, Conway liks his EV for what it isn't - a polluting internal-combustion-engine vehicle.  "I really like that it represents an early attempt to help us move away from oil," he said.

Conway is now 20 and in his sophomore year at the prestigious Rose-Hulman, where he's been head of the electrical engineering team for the school's entry in the national EcoCar collegiate engineering competition that wraps up in May.

In that project, Rose-Hulman's team modified a donated Chevrolet Equinox, turning the gas-fueled crossover SUV into a diesel-electric hybrid for the Energy Department- and GM- sponsored event.

Mechanical or Electrical

Conway says he's not sure which discipline he wants to pursue , mechanical or electrical engineering, but he remains certain that he wants to follow a career path that takes him into the auto industry - with a major automaker or a new-era company such as Tesla Motors - where he can work on electric-drive vehicles.

"I want to see electric vehicles out on the road, being driven by people, and I want to help develop them. Some of my interest is environmental, and some is scientific. I want to help make things happen."

Just this month he began a 6-month paid internship with Tesla, where he'll be dunked deeply into the electrical engineering side of things as he's been assigned to the Northern California company's battery-pack development team.

Contrasting the advanced Tesla Roadster with his Comuta-Car, Conway said, has been a real eye-opener. "It's interesting to see how far we've come and it's exciting to think about how much farther we can go."

Car Story

Conway's car is one of an estimated 4,600 CitiCars and Comuta-Cars built between 1975 and 1982, when they could no longer meet U.S. safety standards without expensive improvements and design changes.

The original manufacturer, Florida-based Vanguard Inc., built an estimated 2,600 CitiCars from 1974-77, when it filed for bankruptcy. A New Jersey mobile home builder acquired the assets and began an upgraded model called the Comuta-Car in 1979, producing and selling about 2,000 before folding in 1982.

The cars used a rack eight 6-volt lead-acid golf cart batteries stowed in a long metal case carried atop the rear bumper - something like the luggage chests on old touring cars.

Conway describes his car's 6-horsepower electric motor as on par with an oversized washing machine motor, but says its simplicity - electric motors have half a dozen basic parts - made it relatively easy to work on once the rewiring was figured out with the help of diagrams posted on the Internet by other Comuta-Car owners.

More to Come

The cars were designed with a top speed of 40 miles an hour, which Conway says his Comuta-Car achieves quite easily, and a range of around 45 miles per charge. It's not fair, though, to compare it with today's crop of low-speed neighborhood EVs, says Conway. "It's more. It's a real car that satisfies most all my daily driving needs."

And while it doesn't meet present safety standards, it is grandfathered-in as a highway (but not freeway) capable vehicle - just as a classic 1920s gasoline car or '60s muscle car would be.

Although he's officially done with the restoration - which involved undoing a previous attempt to modify the car and then completely rewiring it and rebuilding the electric motor -  Conway says he continues to work on the car when he visits home, where it resides for now in his parents' garage.

One improvement he's itching to make is to replace the lead-acid batteries with lighter and more powerful lithium batteries.

Perhaps he can get a deal from Tesla - or take what he learns there and design his own.

John O'Dell:  is an AutoObserver Senior Editor. Follow @AutoObserver on Twitter.