Henk Rogers: Road captain of tomorrow.
Image: Christopher Pala
I have driven the future, and it works.
In this case, the future takes the form a tiny electric sports car with phenomenal acceleration that uses a third of the energy of an equivalent sports car. If you have solar panels at your home connected to a bank of batteries, you can charge its battery overnight and have enough juice to circumnavigate Oahu at least once. You’ll have the double satisfaction of putting out zero carbon dioxide (the engine of a Ferrari F430 with a comparable performance emits a pound a mile) and of being immune to disruptions of the power grid, as a number of owners already are.
The Tesla, whose revolutionary power train is wrapped in a Lotus Elise carbon-fiber body, is the first all-electric car designed for highway speeds–and that’s an understatement. The one I drove is the fourth to arrive in Hawaii, and about the 500th built. I took it up Round Top Drive and as I popped out of corners like a champagne cork, I mentally deleted the vague associations I had with electric cars that came from the GEM, a street-legal golf-cart with a top speed of 25 mph and a range of 30 miles.
The Tesla takes you from 0 to 60 mph in a truly breathtaking 3.9 seconds–faster than the Ferrari, and costing less than half–and it does so effortlessly, with a barely audible whine. That removes any sense of effort or strain from the exercise. You push, it jumps, you overtake and then, removing yet another layer of stress, it starts slowing down all by itself, like a car with a manual V8. That’s because the electric motor goes in reverse and recharges the batteries –all 6,831 of them, little ion-lithium batteries just like the six or 12 that power your laptop.
Of course, you can keep on going all the way to 125 mph, but if you want to hang on to your driver’s license, you won’t, and it’s just as well: the point here is the silent acceleration, not the top speed. And you’d be surprised at the number of opportunities there are in daytime traffic to floor the car for a few seconds and then resume everyone else’s pace.
How this particular Tesla got here is, like many Hawaiian stories, really all about the ocean.
By now you’re aware that the atmosphere is warming up because cars and power plants have belched huge amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) into it over the past two centuries. But did you know that every hour, 100 million tons of CO2 sink into the ocean? CO2 makes water acidic. The world’s only precise ocean acidity record is on a buoy called Station Aloha anchored north of Honolulu, and it shows that about half of the acidity increase of the past 200 years–a total rise of 30 percent–happened in the past two decades. If things keep on going the way they are, creatures that suck the calcium out of the water to build their shells like corals and shellfish will simply dissolve, and in a few decades snorkeling in Hawaii will be like snorkeling in the Galapagos Islands, where the water is naturally acidic and where virtually no coral grows.
Four years ago, Hawaii businessman Henk Rogers read an article about ocean acidification. He’d recently had a heart attack. In the ambulance, he was struck by a powerful thought: “I’m not ready to die, I still have stuff to do.”
By most standards, Rogers had already done quite a bit of stuff. He’d grown up in the Netherlands and lived in New York, Hawaii (to attend UH), Japan and San Francisco before returning to Honolulu seven years ago. He’d amassed a fortune through one of the world’s most amusingly pointless inventions: the Tetris game, played by pretty much everybody everywhere and soon to be available on restaurant menus, toilet paper-holders and Mars (OK, maybe not). And he’d raised four children.
“Afterwards,” he told me as we tooled along the H-1, hopping from spot to spot in the traffic, “I wondered: what did I mean? What was this stuff that I still had to do? Then I read the article about ocean acidification, how if we don’t change, there won’t be any coral left, and I thought: everyone has to do something for mankind and my job is going to be to stop us from putting out more carbon dioxide.”
So Rogers founded the Blue Planet Foundation with a focused goal of turning Hawaii from the U.S. state that gets the biggest proportion of its energy from carbon-producing fossil fuel (90 percent) to the first one to use “as close none as possible in 10 years, and once that’s done, then clean up the rest of the Pacific Rim and finally the rest of the planet,” said Rogers only half-seriously.
That means promoting electric cars like the Tesla (he’s had “Blue Planet Foundation Electric Vehicle” written on the doors), even though he commutes to work on an electric scooter and otherwise drives a hybrid gasoline-electric Prius; lobbying the Legislature to promote solar, wind, geothermal and ocean energy so that one day the juice coming out of your plug to recharge your electric car will also be carbon-free; and building a bigger-than-he-needs solar farm on his 28-acre ranch on the Big Island to study how to store excess renewable energy.
“This acidification happened on our watch,” says Rogers, who is 55. “We made this mess, it’s up to us to clean it up, not pass it on to our kids.”
Want to help? Buy a Tesla. Or, if your bank won’t lend you the $101,500 (after tax breaks), wait until 2012 for the sedan Tesla S: it’s gorgeous and it’s scheduled to be priced under $50,000.
From the TV special “It’s Easy Being Green”Click
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