Electric car enthusiast Roderick Wilde invited a few of his out-of-town friends out for lunch on Thursday, drawing a lot of curiosity and providing a chance for them to preach the gospel of driving piston-free.
“They are more fun to drive,” said Tom Saxton of Sammamish.
“There is no transmission and no need to shift gears, which you need to do with an internal combustion engine to control the torque.
“In my electric car, I can just hit the accelerator and off I go.”
Zero to sixty, he said, in four seconds.
Saxton arrived at the Point Hudson Cafe at about 1 p.m, in a blue Tesla Roadster and a windswept woman — his wife, Cathy — in the passenger seat.
He rode in formation with his friends Richard Kaethler and David Denhart, both of Redmond, respectively in red and yellow Teslas.
The Teslas are comparable to Ferraris in style and price, costing around $110,000.
The members of this little electric car club — all are computer programmers — said the cars are worth the cost.
On the other hand, they sometimes wish it were different.
“I would have loved the opportunity to buy [the soon to be released] Nissan Leaf for $30,000,” Denhart said.
“But it wasn’t available and I wanted to get in on the ground floor as a user of this technology.”
“The first cell phones were thousands of dollars,” Cathy Saxton said.
“The only people who bought them were people with money who became early adopters and drove interest in the technology.
“We can afford to drive these cars, and we take the opportunity to tell people how wonderful they are.”
After lunch, the group posed for pictures in the parking lot, and drew a small but curious crowd.
While the smooth lines and the efficient design was eye-catching, the most compelling aspect of the cars was the absolute silence as they drove away.
The group had stopped in Port Townsend on the way to Kingston, where they expected to purchase a unit that will allow them to charge their cars more quickly.
The charging process is the least understood, Tom Saxton said.
“It’s just like a cell phone,” he said.
“You come home, pull into the garage and plug in the charger which gives you enough juice to drive around the next day.”
That is, unless your daily drive is longer than a 200-mile range.
This is not a setback, Kaethler said.
“Maybe one day out of every year, I want to drive more than 500 miles, and owning an electric car is a disadvatage,” he said.
“But for the other 364, it’s just perfect.”
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Jefferson County Reporter Charlie Bermant can be reached at 360-385-2335 or charlie.bermant@peninsuladailynews.com.
