Shift into Electric

Shift into Electric

Spend most of your day in a five-mile maze? Green Motors has the right tool for your job.

The cavernous building on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley once housed the gas-guzzling Cadillac, a car that brings to mind drive-in movie make-out sessions and days of American automotive prowess. Today that same building is home to what Marc Korchin hopes will become a new American symbol: the electric car.

It might be hard to make out in the backseat (and especially difficult in the two-seater ZENN), but these electric cars have other qualities that appeal to American sensibilities, post-global warming. They are green and hip, easy to squeeze into the rare urban parking space and as Korchin says, “the right tool for the job.”

Korchin, who opened his Green Motors last November, used to drive around town in an SUV. A year ago, he saw the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? about how General Motors produced, leased, pulled and literally crushed the EV-1, a sleek electric car that did everything a gas-powered car can do.

The documentary stirred up this mild-mannered, 52-year-old salesman. After much research, Korchin bought his wife the four-seat Dynasty IT and the family was hooked. He worked with the city to open Green Motors in the only available building still zoned for car sales and now Korchin says he gets blessed more than the pope for selling these cars.

“For 44 years I’ve tried to figure out why I’m living in Berkeley,” say Korchin. “Now I know my purpose.”

What remains to be seen is whether Korchin is the “hundredth monkey” pushing electric at just the right time, as gas prices continue to soar, or if he’s just an eco-friendly Don Quixote whose pitch will ultimately fall flat (even in Berkeley) on drivers who must go fast by any means necessary. What is certain is that Korchin is among the few risking everything on the idea that people will actually change how they live to benefit the environment.

The race is on to come up with battery technology for full-speed electric cars—batteries that can hold a charge long enough for the average driver and be affordable. These cars are known as Battery Electric Vehicles or BEVs. The cars leased by GM and other automakers 10 years ago could go far and fast, but at the time they didn’t hold a charge for more than 100 miles, a problem for some drivers. The only BEV on the market right now is the Tesla Roadster that uses a lithium-ion battery and will sell for around $89,000.

Until affordable BEVs hit the market (possibly by the end of this year or early 2009), Korchin is selling a new paradigm with so-called Neighborhood Electric Vehicles or NEVs. The cars he sells—the IT for around $22,000, the ZENN for around $14,000 and soon E-Ride trucks—are only allowed to go 25 miles per hour and must be recharged every 35 miles. (Recharging amounts to plugging the car into an electrical outlet with an extension cord.) That means no gas stations and no eight tons of carbon dioxide emitted each year.

“You wouldn’t use a sledgehammer to hang a picture,” says, Korchin, giving just one of his many stock reasons why these cars make sense. Korchin contends that many people spend life shuttling from home to school to work to soccer practice to the grocery store and back, going less than 25 miles a day. For the trips to the airport and for weekends out of town, there’s always the second car—the gas car.

Take the Korchins. Marc goes to the dealership and his wife, Alison Gill, edits a national environmental journal on the edge of the U.C. Berkeley campus. They drive 12-year-old Jonah to Albany Middle School or crew practice; ferry 6-year-old Shauna to Marin School and tap class; and pick up grandma Sylvia Korchin from her North Berkeley home. That’s life, pretty much.

“It started drawing crowds, just sitting there,” says Gill, who made a simple flier about her IT to hand out to passersby. (Apparently the family’s enthusiastic flier efforts led little Shauna to ask, “Daddy, when did we go into the flier business?”) Gill says the attention quickly went to her husband’s head.

“I thought everyone was looking at me,” says Korchin. “Then I realized it was the car.”

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At his Green Motors dealership where the tiny cars take up a fraction of the space, Korchin opens the “tricked-out” ZENN and proudly points out the sunroof, stereo, energy gauge, the horn that beeps like something French, the faux-wood veneer, even the cup holder. He pulls into his parking lot and stops talking to show how quiet the car can be. When an unexplained beeping sound interrupts the sounds of silence, he says, “What does it mean? I think it means everything is good. You’re a great guy.”

Korchin can’t believe he’s a car salesman. In fact, he’s more like a 10-year-old boy who’s made his mom a pinch-pot at camp and really, really hopes she’ll like it. He bristles at the thought of seeming like a car dealer and says he’ll serve Numi Tea in the showroom and offer up half the space to environmentalists who need a place to meet. He’s planning a monthly “grasshopper market” at his dealership where local green products can be displayed and sold. U.C. Berkeley will be parking a hydrogen fuel cell charging station on his lot for electric car drivers to use for re-charging.

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Korchin arrived in Berkeley at age 9, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. His father, Shelly Korchin, was head of the Psychology Department at Cal who backed Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s efforts to teach at the university. In spite of his progressive roots, Korchin spent his career in professions like sales and public relations, not necessarily making waves to save the planet or humanity.

Since opening in November, Green Motors has sold some 15 electric cars, mostly ZENNs.

Prospective customers like San Francisco resident David Alwea, are trickling in with promises that the dealership and parent companies will treat him like family, giving props, T-shirts, the first crack at new technology and even a place to blog about the cars. Alwea seems to be smack in the electric car demographic: youngish (in a forties-are-the-new-thirties sort of way), green-minded, technologically savvy and single or coupled.

He’s an avid biker and outdoorsman who sold his car months ago and has been “borrowing” his girlfriend’s car from time to time. He has considered a Mini Cooper, a Prius, and even put money down on a Smart Car. Alwea kept thinking, “That’s great, but what’s better?” He dug deep in his research about electric and is here at Korchin’s place checking out the ZENN, again. “It’s not whether I’m going to get an electric car,” he says. “It’s when.”

Alwea’s early trepidation about other kinds of electric cars came when his girlfriend questioned their sex appeal and he feared losing “status points.” Many of the electric cars—like the three-wheeler Zap Xebra—have a golf cart quality that doesn’t immediately say “dig my ride?”

Electric car proponents think cities like Berkeley and San Francisco are no-brainers for sales. More hybrid Toyota Priuses are sold here than in any other place in the nation. But so far, electric car dealerships have skirted the major urban centers, popping up in Campbell, Alameda, Martinez and Davis.

One of Korchin’s first ZENN buyers was Good Vibrations founder Joani Blank. He’s also sold to a housewife in Alameda as well as assorted progressives. He thinks young drivers and old drivers—two groups that really shouldn’t go too fast—may represent his most promising demographics.

Kathleen Giustino, a Berkeley second-grade teacher and her husband Larry, a solar energy contractor with A1 Sun, are standing in the fog in front of the ZENN they want to buy. Kathleen has scribbled a list of questions including, “You got yours in 2006, what’s gone wrong?” Korchin is already used to educated buyers. He walks over to the toy-like engine and points to a screw that vibrated loose and melted another piece. He says he treated his electric car as if it would never need occasional maintenance and that was a mistake.

Korchin explains that they’ll be able to come to the dealership for tune-ups and repair work and if they can’t get here, the mechanic will come to them.

The Giustinos want to be satisfied and seem to be with Korchin’s answers. They are longtime environmentalists who already have a tiny carbon footprint and gleefully explain that their electricity meter runs backwards because of their solar panels. They want the electric car because Kathleen is tired of walking to work in the rain and Larry is excited by what seems to be the next Berkeley thing. “This is going to spread like wildfire,” he says.

Ian Clifford, the CEO of the Canadian ZENN Motor Company, says dealers like Korchin are key to making his business take off nationwide. Clifford made his money in the dot-com boom and then spent a small fortune to buy rights to electric car battery technology being developed by former IBM scientists. He’s optimistic that the technology will be out soon and will spur a mass adoption of electric vehicles. Until then, he thinks drivers should take a look at the slower electric vehicles because really, it’s not so bad to slow down. (And as Korchin says, “It’s better to go 25 in the city than 15 on the freeway.”)

“I started this company because there were no options,” says Clifford, who lives in Toronto where, ironically, they don’t allow electric cars on the roads yet. “If I can’t go to my local Ford dealership and buy a zero-emissions car, I don’t have any options.”

If Clifford can find more dealers like Korchin in receptive places like the Bay Area, if gas prices continue to climb and if the battery technology succeeds, he’ll be set. And if Korchin can actually make a living with this green endeavor, he’ll be overjoyed. “I just wondered what kind of legacy I would leave my kids,” says Korchin. “I’d hate for them to say ‘Dad didn’t do what he could have done.’”

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Andrea Lampros is The Monthly’s co-editor and a freelance writer.

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