Will New Drivers Skip Gas Power?

Old Stirling Road resident Ellyn Thwaite, 19, is like many teens this summer in that she made an appointment to take the Division of Motor Vehicles' driver licensing test.

But when she showed up at the DMV's Quakerbridge facility in Lawrenceville last week, the testing officials were a bit flummoxed: her sporty, red Mini was powered by electricity, with no clutch or shifting involved.

"At the testing center, they were quite amused," she said. During the driving test, she added the instructor in the car was "actually fiddling with all the controls and things."

Her father, Michael Thwaite, is an electric car enthusiast, and he's made Ellyn a convert: after getting her license, the Mini was taken to a shop for some testing and maintenance and she was forced to drive in ... a combustion-engine vehicle. 

"It was very strange," she said of the experience.

Comparing the experience of driving a typical vehicle to her electric Mini, she said the Mini is "so smooth to drive," thanks to the electric motor's lack of a transmission and the "regenerative braking" (which captures some of the power back while slowing the vehicle).

"It just stops and goes," she said of the drive. Ellyn noted the parallel parking in an electric vehicle is much easier because "you don't have to do all that clutching and shifting." 

Even Ellyn's friends are intrigued by the electric car.

"I still don't know if they understand it—they ask if it's manual or automatic and it's neither," she said.

Michael pointed out that teaching Ellyn to drive using an electric vehicle offered other advantages, although he asn't sure she'd be able to take the licensing test in it (you can use any vehicle as long as a hand brake is accessible to the instructors).

"We didn't have any worries about doing endless three-point turns and parking because we weren't emitting any obnoxious noise or fumes," he said.

Ellyn dismissed the test as being a bit too short: "They didn't have any deer jumping out or children running across in front of you."

Ellyn may have been the first to show up for the test in an electric vehicle, but it's clear she won't be the last. Michael recited a list of manufacturers bringing electric cars to the market in the coming months, including Mitsubishi, Ford and Honda.

According to the consuting firm Accenture, the market for elecric vehicles in the United States is expected to top 1.5 million by 2015, and as further proof of the market's direction, AAA recently announced it will launch a feet of truck equipped to provide charges to depleted vehicles, much like the fleet providing gas to drivers who forget to fill up.