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David Sargent’s car is green—in more ways than one.
Yup, his cool, two-seat Sterling sports car is green—actually a bright emerald green that’s impossible to miss.
It’s also green, as in good-for-the-environment green.
The car runs on electricity. Not only that, but Sargent is building a micro hydro-powered charger at his Sandy Creek home so he can charge the car using electricity generated from a small stream in his backyard.
“I completed the joke,” said UUP member Sargent, an associate professor of psychology who’s been at SUNY Oswego for more than two decades. “That’s why I painted (the car) green. It was all in fun.”
Sargent, a longtime sports car enthusiast, has been having a ball with his 1978 Sterling, a “kit car” manufactured in England that took him two years to build in his garage, at a cost of $15,000. He’s driven his zippy little car to work several times since putting it on the road over the summer, and he expects to have all the bugs out of it by next spring—when he intends to drive it to work every day.
“I’ve got a network of friends along the route that I can call in case I run out of electricity,” said Sargent, who has ED1SON license plates on the vehicle.
The car, which looks like a cross between a Lotus Elise, a Corvette and the suped-up DeLorean from the “Back to the Future” movies, sits on a stock 1969 Volkswagen Beetle chassis.
There’s little else that’s stock about Sargent’s Sterling.
There’s no engine. Instead, the coupe is fueled by 12 12-volt batteries, which sit where the trunk and engine of the car would ordinarily be. It doesn’t have doors; a hydraulic system lifts up the car’s canopy so the lanky Sargent—who stands six feet two inches tall—can climb inside.
“That’s just about the height limit for the Sterling,” he joked.
What it does have is an outlet for Sargent to plug the car into a regular 110-volt wall socket—using a lime green extension cord—to re-juice the car. It takes about seven hours to recharge the car. Currently, the Sterling carries enough of a charge to get him from his home to SUNY Oswego—exactly 31.5 miles.
Once at Oswego, he plugs his car into an outlet at the campus security building; Oswego has a campuswide go-green initiative in place that encourages employees to aid the environment.
“We’re already studying ways to see what the process would be like if more people start driving (electric) cars to work,” said Cindy Adam, interim chief for Oswego’s University Police. “This is good for the campus and good for the environment.”
Just because the Sterling is a green-friendly car doesn’t mean it’s lost its sports car edge. Sargent said he’s gotten the car up to 48 miles per hour, not bad for a car that rides a few inches from the ground.
“I haven’t had the guts to get it up faster than that,” Sargent said, laughing. “But when I’m sitting at a stop light, I’m not using any energy because there’s no flywheel, no clutch and no engine.”
He’s also using an alternative energy source to fuel his car, one that doesn’t dirty the air and costs a lot less than what it would to keep the car gassed up if it had an engine.
“I don’t know if I’ll break even by using this car, but I know I’m saving money on gas,” he said. “I built this
car to have some fun and, boy, I’m having fun.”
— Michael Lisi