A remote corner of Northland squeezed between Ocean Beach and Mt Mania, does not seem a likely place for a hotbed of practical alternative energy.

Ulrich Schmid with his home-built electric vehicle. Photo Crispin Calidoctt.

For the last nine years this inspiring landscape has been the home of Ulrich Schmid and his family.

Over that time Ulrich has built his own fully working electric vehicle, and demonstrated the use of bio-diesel as an easily obtainable and manufactured alternative fuel.

The story of the electric vehicle has to date, not been solved.

There is little doubt that if some boffin walked in with a pocket sized battery that could drive a vehicle 1000 km without recharging, the world would be a very different place.

Under such unlikely circumstances the internal combustion engine would be redundant.

“There is so little to go wrong with an electric vehicle,” Ulrich said, when Rural Living caught up with him.

“There are very few moving parts, and they keep their value as a result. I tried to buy a Toyota RAV4 second hand once, but even that was US $40,000!”

Ulrich is convinced of the viability of an electric car for many purposes. “The average commuter distance is low – certainly well within the capabilities of current battery technology.

“Even if the range is stretched, they can be recharged during the day in the office car park.

“In a gridlock on the motorway, they won’t use any power, and they’ll be silent. Almost every Kiwi family has a second car, and I’ve proven that a second vehicle can be an electric one.”

Ulrich was quite determined to have an electric car, but ran up against a bewildering plethora of bureaucratic obstacles, only solved by the Swiss equivalent of number eight gauge fencing wire mentality.

“At one point every big USA car manufacturer was building them, and there was a law in California that one per cent of vehicles had to be zero emission, which meant hydrogen or electrically powered.

“However that was changed in 2003 and the vast number of those vehicles, which had been leased, were withdrawn and destroyed.

“I suspect that the motor industry is so tied up with the oil industry that the manufacturers cannot pursue the project.

“They pretend to make electric vehicles, but charge so much for them that no-one is going to buy them, and then say there is no interest!

Importation being effectively excluded either on safety grounds by the LTA or expense, there was only one solution, and that was for Ulrich to construct his own electric vehicle.

“The parts are readily available. The batteries are the best available for their price, and they are Lithium Iron Phosphate.

“They work out at around half the weight of lead/acid equivalents, and given the guarantee on their output, I estimate I will get 500,000 km out of them.

“The motor is an American model – about 15Kw, and the car itself is an old Citroen Dyane, which I chose because it has four seats and is light-weight – around 620kg.

“There are two banks of batteries, one in the boot, and the range of the vehicle is adequate to get me to Whangarei and back, with plenty of reserve. The total cost was about $25,000.”

While Ulrich’s car is sitting in the garage, its batteries are being charged from a whole bank of Solar Photovoltaic cells on the roof of his house.

A ride in the ‘Schmid mk one’ is an edifying experience. It is a very quiet vehicle, and on a sealed road would probably be unnervingly so.

The only sound was road noise from the very rough track we were on, and the rather plaintive sounds of an old Citroen gearbox, slightly past its shelf-life.

“The silence of these vehicles can be a problem, as pedestrians do rely on their hearing as much as sight. I know a guy in Switzerland who has built one and he recorded the sound of the old (petrol) Citroen engine.

"Whenever he is in an urban area, he simply plays that sound through a loudspeaker in the front!”

Ulrich demonstrated the vehicle with a short run starting off down his very steep long driveway.

“It uses regenerative braking, which can be turned on, to prevent it running away downhill.  So without doing anything we just travel downhill without accelerating – as if we were locked in first gear on an ordinary car."

"On the open road it travels along very easily, and the amp hour meter here just acts like the equivalent of a fuel gauge and tells me how much power I have.”

Uphill the car was even more impressive, using only around 70-80 amps.

“Of course it’s not as good uphill because it is front wheel drive. The big advantage of an electric motor is you have all the torque from the beginning.

"We could go much faster than the 20k we are doing, but it would simply skid, because there is so much torque available.

"It is important to remember with a vehicle like this that it is actually very simple technology, and all the parts are easily available world-wide.  The batteries are more expensive than lead/acid ones, but they will last much longer, and easily recover the outlay.”

Ulrich and his family are very committed to alternative systems, and this also includes all the other vehicles the family uses.

“All our cars are diesel,” he explained.

“But we use bio-diesel which we get for free. It comes from several restaurants in the area which have waste cooking oil they don’t know what to do with. I collect it, treat it in the garage with a very simple chemical reaction, and it becomes usable fuel.”

The use of bio-diesel is well-known. However producing enough of it creates problems.

It has been said that producing a gallon of bio-diesel from rape-seed oil uses more energy than a man needs to stay alive in a whole year.

But the cooking-oil/diesel Ulrich is making is an entirely waste product, and appropriate for use for any diesel engine with minor conversions.

“The tractor uses it too, and I estimate that with the cost of my plant, but not including my time, a litre only costs between 55-60 cents.

Clearly Ulrich’s experiments with alternative power are showing the way forward for many Kiwis.

There may not be enough restaurants in the country to provide fuel for all our vehicles, or indeed tractors, but sunshine is free, and as he has demonstrated all the parts to construct a fully functional electric vehicle are available at no great cost.