By PRESTON LERNER

Photographs by JOHN B. CARNETT

 

IT WAS LIKE FRANKENSTEIN, only faster. JB Straubel, in 1999 an emerging superstar in Stanford University's school of engineering, had been haunting the student machine shop, fabricating parts for his '84 Porsche 944 from midnight until 4 in the morning. Working by trial and error, he developed his own power controller and charger. He mated together two electric motors

 

with a homemade coupler and belt system. He gutted the car and crammed in 840 pounds' worth of lead-acid batteries. Start to finish, the project took him a year.

 

By early 2000, Straubel had taken a piece of once-state-of-the-art German engineering and transmogrified it into a pretty advanced science-fair project: The World's Fastest Electric Car. Or so he hoped. With 180 kilowatts at his disposal (about 240 horsepower), the car had enough power, he estimated, to set an electric-vehicle world record for the quarter mile. Just one problem: Total range was 20 miles. What good is it, he figured, to build an all-electric emission-free dragster, if you're just going to tow it to the racetrack on the back of a big truck?

 

And so Straubel set about doing what any driven, somewhat obsessive-compulsive engineering graduate student would do. He bought a Volkswagen Beetle for $500, chopped it in two with a shop saw, and used a trailer hitch to attach the back halfthe part with the engine and driven wheelsto the rear of the Porsche. He ran a remote throttle and ignition from the VW to the Porsche's driver's seat. From there, he sat and steered while his mongrelized single-axle trailer pushed the 944 down the road.

 

I drove it 800 miles to Oregon, Straubel says. The problem was not the obvious potential for jackknifing. Rather, it was that while he was up ahead in the Porsche, the clutch and stick shift were back in the VW. I'd leave it in third or fourth gear and start off under the Porsche's power, he recalls. The VW would lug and make all these terrible noises until I got up to speed. Then I'd turn on the ignition, and it would start running and pushing the Porsche. That was a hell of a trip.

 

The Porsche did eventually break the world record for the electric-vehicle quarter mile17.278 seconds at 79.14 mph, set at Silent Thunder 2000, a National Electric Drag Racing event in Sacramento, California. Today Straubel finds that time embarrassing. His latest all-electric creation is faster off the line than a 510-horsepower Lamborghini Gallardo. More important, it can run 250 miles between charges, not 20, in large part because it's powered by laptop batteries. And beginning later this year, anyone with $100,000 can buy one straight off the assembly line.

 

Straubel has proven that he can build an electric car that's as good as gasone that doesn't sacrifice power, range or speed. But does that mean the Tesla Roadster heralds a new era of electric vehicles on every street corner, as he believes? Or will the Tesla, impressive as it is, be remembered as just another electric-vehicle science-fair project?