Electric car advocate Chelsea Sexton started her career selling cars for a Saturn dealership in California. In the late 1990s, she fell in love with General Motors' new, fast, and quiet EV1 electric car, making for an easy sales pitch. (She also fell in love with an EV1 mechanic: The two "dated" by fixing cars together, and later married.) Sexton says she never found a gas car that could beat the EV1 sprinting from a dead stop at a green light-although, according to Sexton (who admits to a weakness for street racing), many challengers tried.

When pressure from the government andoil interests, and even within the automaker itself prompted GM to pull EV1s off the market and physically crush them, Sexton and other electric car enthusiasts banded together in protest. They offered up a $1.9 million check to buy the doomed cars and were ignored. Sexton's campaign was featured in the 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?. In one poignant scene, she visited one of the last EV1s in the garage of an auto museum. The shiny red car had been disabled, and Sexton lamented that she still recalled the original buyer. "It shouldn't be part of automotive history," she chastised the curator.

If Sexton has anything to say about it, it won't. Currently, she is the executive director of Plug In America, an advocacy group she helped found that tries to ensure that electric cars will be part of a vibrant, cleaner future, instead of relegated to history. Her organization gives consumers tools for lobbying automakers and legislators to get more electric cars on the road. Here, she answers Blue Egg's questions about plug-in hybrids, why it's easier to plug in than pump gas, and why she's still driving a gas car.

What exactly is a plug-in hybrid?
I call it the killer app of automotive technology. It's one car that has the best of EVs [electric vehicles] and hybrids combined. So your first 30 or 40 miles of the day would be electric-Monday through Friday, you might never use gasoline, since the average commute in this country is only 30 miles, but you also have a back-up ability to put gas in the car for the flexibility of a hybrid.

Would that technology be considered better than a fully electric car?
It's not better, it's just different. At Plug In America, we don't tell anyone what they should be driving, but we push companies to make more choices available so that consumers can make their own decisions. Fully electric vehicles have ranges of up to 200, 250 miles these days, which is comparable to a gas car. But people who really need that ability to refuel in just a couple of minutes, rather than charging overnight, would be more open to a plug-in hybrid. It offers the general consumers who've never thought of plugging in [a chance] to try it with a safety net.

Plug-in hybrids also have a lower incremental cost, because they have a smaller battery pack; batteries are the most expensive component in an electric-drive car. That helps keep the cost low for people who want to try plugging in, but can't spend $100,000 on a Tesla [Roadster] to do it, as awesome as that car is.

Have you taken one for a spin?
I have!

So how does it handle?
Oh, the Tesla is wicked fun to drive. I'm a girl who already appreciates torque and horsepower more than most guys I know. As much as I love environmental vehicles, I am also a "car girl," and so to get both in one package is awesome [laughs].

Where did you drive it?
I drove it around their corporate headquarters in San Carlos, about four years ago.

And how fast did you go?
Fast enough that we had to take it back to the facility.

You mean you couldn't be trusted to drive the speed limit?
[Laughing] Well, I don't think the local roads were really meant for drag racing, but it's awfully fun. I used to do it all the time in the EV1 as well. The EV1 was not Tesla-fast, but it could take a [Dodge] Viper off the line, and it was something I proved every single day I drove that car.

I had read that you drive a Saturn. Is that still true?
It is still true. I still have my Saturn. It was actually my last act when I left GM and had to give up my EV1 that I'd been driving for six years and I had to buy something. I've always liked Saturn-that's where I started-so my decision was to get a good little economic gas car and drive it until they built something with a plug on it again. I personally won't buy one of the currently available hybrids. I'd love a plug-in hybrid or an electric car-it doesn't have to be fully electric-but I want the ability to plug in. I don't want to be just putting gas in the car forever. So that's my choice: to keep driving what I have until they make something better.

Why are you reluctant to buy a hybrid?
It's not that hybrids are bad. They're just not good enough. I use the analogy of accepting B's from your kids when you know they could get A's. I worked in the industry and saw what was possible. The models that came out as hybrids were really watered down.

To be clear, though, if someone has to buy a car right now, if you cannot wait and you need to be in the market for a vehicle, a hybrid is an excellent choice. What I suggest is that if you don't have to buy a car right now, keep driving what you're driving for even a couple of more years and you'll have many more choices than you do today. Pick your favorite automaker, call, and simply say, "I love your company, but I'd really like to buy a plug-in hybrid or an electric vehicle." What we know for sure is that you'll never see in the showroom what you don't ask for.

For most people, calling a car company seems like it would be on a list of unpleasant activities right under "paying taxes." How do you motivate people to take action?
Some people are more comfortable making phone calls, some prefer to pick up a picket sign, some would rather write letters, some would rather just write a check to the organization that does the work and not get involved at all. All of those options are fine. For those who call the automakers, we try to make it really simple. We give you a 1-800 number that is the direct centralized phone number where they have to log all the phone calls that come in. Really the point is to get it registered. If they see a certain volume of calls that say 'I'd like a plug-in car' they have to address that issue.

Does that work?
Well, GM has announced two plug-in hybrids in the last two months...so I'm thinking, yes.

What about the folks who want the biggest, baddest SUV possible?
They need to call GM and say, "I want a plug-in hybrid Hummer." Electricity can be integrated with any body style of vehicle. One of the plug-in hybrids that GM has announced is a Saturn View. It's not their biggest SUV, but it's an SUV. There's no reason we can't make plug-in hybrid F-150s or Suburbans.

If you got an electric vehicle, you'd need to be able to plug it in, right?
Absolutely. A lot of electric cars, and particularly plug-in hybrids for the future, they charge off regular 110 outlets-any outlets you can use. There are some that charge off the faster 220 outlets, which are what your dryer runs off of. There's a network of public charging stations in California and everywhere else where there used to be [fully] electric cars.

While you don't have to have public charging, it's nice. It's clear that wherever electric cars come out in the future there are likely to be public charging stations. People could charge at Costco, at Ralphs, at shopping malls-places where people want to spend some time. You don't have to camp out at a gas station for an hour. You just go from charger to charger. I never actually had a charger at home the whole time I worked for GM. I only used public charging and I never ran out.

There are mechanics who convert gas cars into electric ones. What's stopped you from converting your Saturn?
Well, I find that activism doesn't pay very well [chuckles]. That's certainly a factor.

It's expensive to do?
People do it for $10,000 or less and some people spend $50,000 to do it. It depends on whether you want to make a 40-mile range car or a 300-mile range car, what you're starting with, what kind of batteries you want.

For you, what is the most attractive thing about an electric car?
For the actual driving experience, electric is really fun because it's smooth. They're fast, they're quiet and they're clean. The driving experience aside, just the fact that you're using domestic energy and it's much cheaper. Electricity is the equivalent of 60 cents to a dollar per gallon, so you're driving on a fraction of the cost of gasoline. It doesn't contribute to global warming in nearly as significant a way as gasoline. There's still some pollution derived from electricity on the grid because we do get some of our electricity from coal, but the car itself doesn't pollute at all. Even taking the grid into account, electric cars are about twice as clean as the cleanest gas cars.

One of the things we like about plug-in hybrids is that you can also use ethanol or renewable diesel or even hydrogen if it ever becomes viable, as that second fuel. You end up with this one car that's the best of both worlds, and gasoline isn't part of the equation at all.

Are electric cars from the late '90s still on the road today?
They are! We have about a thousand of the production cars and several thousand conversions that are still on the road, they're still being driven and maintained. They're performing really well-even Toyota has said to us, "We had no idea that the RAV-4 and the batteries and everything would last that long." We're seeing lots of cars that are topping 100,000 miles on their original batteries. They're cheap to maintain-there's no oil changes or spark plugs.

People think of plugging in as inconvenient until you do it. Plugging in takes three seconds. You do it in your own garage and then you go upstairs and go to sleep and your car is full the next morning. Once you do that a couple times you figure out that going to the gas station is what's inconvenient.

How close are we to realizing your vision?
I think we're a couple years from plug-in cars from major automakers. In the meantime, we have these lovely Davids of the world doing electric cars. I appreciate and I'm proud of all of them. Just the fact that we're still having this conversation and it didn't all die and get buried and we're stuck with gasoline forever is a pretty cool accomplishment.

I love the fact that my little boy doesn't know a time before electric cars are on the road. It's sort of a foregone conclusion for him at the age of eight that his first car will be plugging in. We have a whole new generation that's coming up without having gasoline be the only way. That's pretty cool.

Related Resources

Related Articles Not for the Birds- Laura and Will Wear, Environmentalists The Cassandra of Carbon Extreme Times Call for X-Treme Measures- Frank Scura See All Related Articles

Related Eco Categories How to Guides Top 10s Transportation & Travel Science & Technology

Topics Saving Money Business Family Home Health

Tip of the Day Lose the Roof Rack Buy an Air Conditioner with a Deep Discount See All Tips

Glossary Wind farm Low flush toilet Megawatt (MW) Environmental racism Ozone Full Glossary

Site Resources Directory Answers Quizzes