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Published: May 16, 2008 04:49 pm
Electric car is a shocking sight
By GINA KINSLOW
Glasgow Daily Times
EDMONTON —
Matt Gallagher gets some pretty funny looks when he drives through town in his battery-electric car.
“It flips people out,” he said. “They can’t figure it out.”
He has even come close to getting run over by people who become distracted when they see the car coming down the street.
People have called it a variety of names.
“It’s been called ‘egg’ and ‘an undercover helicopter’ and everything else,” Gallagher said.
The tiny, white two-seater is a Neighborhood Electric Vehicle manufactured by Global Electric Motorcars or GEM, a Chrysler company, in Fargo, N.D.
According to the company’s Web site, GEM cars are powered by a 72-volt battery system, which provides power to a custom controller and powers the electric drive motor. The cars use a variety of batteries.
It takes roughly four to six hours to fully charge the cars battery.
“It costs about 50 cents to charge it up,” Gallagher said.
He drives the car to work nearly every day as a means of saving money on gas.
“It saves me $60 per week,” he said.
The fastest the car will go is 35 mph.
Gallagher lives about three miles from work, but he doesn’t just use the car for the daily commute.
Gallagher is an auto mechanic and he has been known to use the car to drive down to the parts store every now and then.
There are at least two Chrysler auto dealers in Kentucky that sell the cars — Martin Dodge Jeep in Bowling Green and Tanner Chrysler Products, Inc. in Stanton.
Johnny Wilson, fleet manager for Martin Dodge Jeep in Bowling Green, has sold several of the cars, mostly to universities, property management firms and hospitals.
Some of his customers are: University of Tennessee, Tennessee Tech, University of Louisville, Western Kentucky University and the Medical Center at Bowling Green.
“They are becoming more and more popular,” Wilson said.
Tennessee Tech sent Wilson an e-mail after conducting a study to see how many miles the GEM gets per full charge.
Wilson said the e-mail read, “‘If one calculates the amount of electricity to charge for 30 miles and uses a baseline of $3 per gallon of gas ... ,’ they are saying they can get 180 miles per gallon.”
UT officials did their own calculation and said they can get 150 miles per gallon per full charge on their GEM cars.
“They are big energy savers, of course, and great on the environment,” Wilson said.
Gallagher did not buy his GEM new. He bought it from Linda Gleason after her husband, Herb, passed away.
Gallagher and Herb were good friends. Gleason was a car collector and, according to his wife Linda, when he first saw a GEM, he had to have one.
The Gleasons purchased the car from Martin Dodge Jeep in Bowling Green.
“It was very convenient for running around town,” she said.
Linda had at least three other people make offers for the GEM before she finally sold it to Gallagher. The number of offers she has had, she said, proves the car is gaining in popularity and Gallagher agrees.
“eBay is eat up with them,” he said.
How much one of the cars costs depends on which model is purchased. According to the company’s Web site, a standard GEM e2 two-passenger model starts at $6,795 MSRP.
The most expensive GEM Wilson sold cost $21,000, but he pointed out that was for a six-seater that “had all the bells and whistles on it you can imagine.”
The cars are available with several options, in-cluding soft doors, custom wheels, car covers and a lockable TrunkBack. They also come in a variety of colors, such as red, yellow, green, white, blue, silver and black, the company’s Web site said.
More information about the cars is available by visiting the company’s Web site at www.gemcar.com.
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