By Karen Blakeman
Advertiser Staff Writer
Flight crews disembarking at Hickam Air Force Base will ride across the flight line to their quarters in an electrically powered bus later this year.
Six new, all-electric Hyundai sport utility vehicles are also scheduled to join the Hickam ground fleet this summer. These vehicles and the bus will be fueled by fast, high-tech electric chargers.
The vehicles and chargers are part of a federally financed, two-year test program with state and private participation designed to move cleaner, more efficient forms of transportation out of the laboratories and on to the nation’s roads.
Patrick Lindo, a fleet manager for Hickam, said the base is a good place to test the latest generation of electrically powered vehicles.
"We’re gonna work these things," he said Friday.
The bus will be used for round-the-clock flight-line transportation. Two sport utility vehicles will go to the Air Force security forces.
"If we want to find out how these vehicles stand up to tough usage, the security forces will show that," Lindo said. "They put a lot of miles on their cars."
Three of the cars will go to transportation, where Air Force personnel can check them out for a few hours or days.
One vehicle will be used by civil engineers.
Three special-rapid chargers will be installed on the base, one on the flight line and two in general access areas.
Hickam received $1 million from special congressional appropriation money to pay for the charging stations and other miscellaneous costs.
The prototype SUVs are being provided by Hyundai through a state-managed program to test the vehicles. The SUVs will be returned to the company in two years.
The test program could make Hawai‘i the top electronic-ready state, said Thomas L. Quinn, director of the Hawai‘i Electronic Vehicle Demonstration Project.
The rapid chargers, developed by AeroVironment Inc., could help Hawai‘i overcome California’s lead, Quinn said.
"Typically, you plug your electrical vehicle in and let it charge overnight," Quinn said. "With these rapid chargers, you can recharge in minutes instead of hours."
The newer line of vehicles can also be plugged into a garage outlet when a slow charge is more convenient.
The new electric-powered vehicles are designed to get 90 to 100 miles per charge, Quinn said. Their speeds will rival those of gas-fueled vehicles.
"They’re not like those little vehicles you see on the roads now," he said. "Those are more like glorified golf carts. These will perform like any other vehicle on the road."
The new sport utility vehicles won’t look like golf carts, either.
Hyundai will convert a line of SUVs that it has been selling as a normal gas-fueled vehicle - the Santa Fe - into a fully electric-powered vehicle, Quinn said. The electric SUVs will look the same as their internal combustion engine forerunners, but will have batteries instead of gas tanks, electric motors instead of engines.
They are to arrive in Hawai‘i in a few months, and will be tested by Enova Systems technicians before being added to the base fleet.
Officials expect the sport utility vehicles to arrive on base in July. The bus will take a little longer.
The 30-foot-long bus was purchased under an earlier grant as an electric-internal combustion hybrid, and was used by the Air Force in that incarnation for the past several years.
[back to top] |
