Institute promotes electric car to head of class

BY VIRGINIA CODY

David Turock gets 404 miles per gallon with his new car, the Chevy Volt.

That kind of efficiency is one of the best reasons for consumers to opt for an all electric or electric hybrid car when they’re ready to trade in their old one, the 1977 Keystone College graduate said.

“With the price of gas at $3.50 a gallon, it makes sense.”

“I want one,” Markie Pratt of Kingsley said Friday as she returned from a test drive.

Turock’s presentation at Keystone was part of a course called Climate Change and the Energy Challenge, a program to help teachers make sense of the ever-growing minutia related to carbon footprinting and global warming.

Not only did teachers get to learn all the science related to alternative energy cars, they got to test drive a Volt that Turock brought to Keystone just for that purpose.

Pratt, a Scranton High School family and consumer science, and culinary arts teacher, said her only concern was that she lived on a dirt road and wasn’t sure how the car would do during the winter.

Turock assured her that the car does quite well in snow up to seven inches deep.  And, he said, it’s programmed to detect slippery conditions so icy roads aren’t as worrisome as one might expect.

Craig Muller, a sixth grade teacher at Lackawanna Trail Elementary School, already knows a lot about what Turock has to teach teachers.

Muller drives a competitor hybrid car, a 2009 Prius.

“I bought it to support the technology,” he said.  “You should vote with your wallet, that you want this kind of change.”

Muller, who says he gets 45 miles to the gallon, explained that a computer inside the engine decides when it should shift between running on electric energy and starting up the gasoline power.

“But you can’t even tell when the motor goes on,” he added.

Muller added that the gas powered engine for the Prius extends the electrical charge which, according to Turock, enables the car to run on electric for 100 miles before switching over to the gas powered engine.

“When you’re going downhill, the engine is charging, when you brake, the engine is charging,” Muller said.

Turock explained further that while brakes in a conventional automobile rub together and vent unused energy from friction, the Prius and the Volt are engineered to capture that energy to recharge the engine.

The Prius and the Volt are, in Turock’s view, equally environmentally friendly, and with conventional engines can be adapted easily to run on natural gas.

On the economic side of the story, Turock says the Volt saves consumers money in several ways.

First, although the sticker price on the car is around $33,000, there’s a government rebate of $7,500 that comes right off your taxes.

Secondly, he says, with gas costing what it does today, the average driver is spending about $350 a month on gas.  If your car payment is $350, it’s certainly not costing any more to own it than if you kept your fully paid-for gasoline-powered car and kept filling the gas tank.

“It costs $1.36 a charge for 100 miles of driving in Pennsylvania,” Turock said, adding that studies have shown that 90 percent of the U.S. population drives less than 40 miles a day.

“You plug it in at night, and you’re ready to go in the morning,” he said.

Lastly, because most of the driving uses electric energy, conventional maintenance isn’t required as often.

“You don’t have to replace the brakes for at least 100,000 miles,” he said.

Of course, there are some quirks still to iron out with the hybrid and all electric cars, Turock said.  The battery is very heavy, so generalizing the technology to larger vehicles like bulky SUVs or tractor trailers won’t be seen in the immediate future.

But for now, Turock sees the Volt, the Prius, and the other hybrid and all electric models of cars in various stages of development or production as a real step in the right direction.

And, it is messages like these that Muller and Pratt want to bring back to the classroom in September.

“I think it’s important to teach our students about energy conservation, the need for us to learn more about alternative energy sources and products,” Muller said.

Most importantly, though, he noted that as his students go forward in life, he hoped “they can reverse some of the mistakes we’ve made.”