Things I Remember about having an Electric Car

From 1999 to 2003 my family had two Dodge EPICs which were all electric versions of the Dodge Caravan minivan. We first saw them at the 1998 Alameda International EV Exposition. I was 15 when we got the first one so I didn’t experience all the details of ownership but rather learned to drive in the electric cars my parents owned.

Even though they were minivans they could only seat 5 people. This was because the batteries were so heavy that it’d be over the weight limit for cars with more people in it. Because of this limit it didn’t even have a middle seat which did give us lots of leg room in the back.
Despite the fact that they were electric powered, they didn’t even have electric windows. They were totally optionless and with bare minimum features. You couldn’t even pick a color, every single one was white with a gray cloth interior.
Like most electric cars the Dodge EPICs were lease only. Thankfully the lease covered repairs because they broke down a lot and could be in the shop for a month at a time. Unthankfully, there was absolutely no option to keep them once the lease was up.
The electricity service in our house got switched to a plan where we paid more for electricity during the day and less at night. In addition to charging the cars overnight we also got used to running our appliances in the middle of the night. (I’m still in that habit and use the 4 or 8 hour delay on my dishwasher so it runs while I’m sleeping.)
The cars were capped at 85mph. (I suppose this may have been reassuring to my parents as my brother and I started driving, we could speed on the freeway but not that much.)
If you accelerated too quickly the car would sort of freeze up and you’d have to turn it off and back on the next time you stopped or you wouldn’t be able to accelerate at all. This always got me when driving to school because I had to turn on to a street with a 50mph speed limit right when it started going over the train tracks.
In theory each car could go 100 miles on a charge. It typically took 6-8 hours to charge each car and we only had one charger for two cars.
After having my drivers license for a mere three days, I was driving home from school and should have had plenty of electricity to get home but the battery decided to stop holding a charge so I had to figure out how to get a car towed.
The electric vehicles could not be towed by regular tow trucks, they required flat bed tow trucks because the batteries were so heavy so we spent a lot of time waiting for appropriate tow trucks to arrive.
We had some of the very first carpool lane OK stickers (before the ones common on hybrids in California now). My brother got pulled over for driving the carpool lane without a passenger in the car and the Highway Patrol Officer had never even heard of the program before. (He didn’t get a ticket after explaining the program to the officer.)

I think being an electric car driver was a good experience but I do fully understand how they had enough problems not to be worth it. I’m interested in seeing more hybrids that do store a charge when you’re not driving them and can be charged off the electric grid but have the option to use other fuel sources when you need more distance. I’m also very interested in biodiesel (and one of the gas stations I pass every day on my way to work sells it) and would like to see more diesel-hybrid options.

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