Bring Unwanted Electronics to Hilliard’s Earth Day Celebration
April 18, 2016
Hilliard Farmers’ Market 2016
May 18, 2016One of the best ways to protect our planet is by limiting harmful emissions into the atmosphere, and a significant portion of emissions comes from transportation. To showcase some greener options, the Ohio State EcoCAR 3 team and the city of Hilliard brought various eco-friendly vehicles to the Hilliard Earth Day Celebration over the weekend.
Some of the cars displayed included the Chevrolet Volt, Tesla Model S, Nissan Leaf, Ford C-MAX, BMW x5 eDrive, and Coda electric car, as well as a Victory Empulse TT electric motorcycle and a transformed 1967 Mercury Cougar.
The Cougar, also known as the Bad Cat, was transformed about five years ago into an electric vehicle that just started off as “eye-candy” for the owner’s business.
“I enjoyed driving it after it was converted to an electric vehicle because it was so smooth and had so much power. It became one of my favorite cars to drive,” said the owner of the car, Royce Wood, who owns a repair shop in Westerville. “I’ve always been a car guy. I’ve been messing with cars since I was old enough to stand.”
Besides being better for the environment, the street-friendly power of an electric vehicle is one of the other benefits of owning a car like this. You can get a lot of power with gasoline engines, but that kind of design is frequently not as street-friendly. The transformed Cougar has tremendous horsepower and torque while still being pleasant to drive. When it was tested on a dynamometer, the Cougar had 425 horsepower and 800 pound-feet of torque at the rear wheels.
Wood said he wanted to keep the muscle car feel of the Cougar while making it electric, which is also the goal of the Ohio State EcoCAR team in its quest to reengineer a 2016 Chevrolet Camaro in a four-year competition against 15 other universities across North America. The team is heading out to Yuma, Arizona and then San Diego, California in May for the Year Two competition.
Green machines are taking the world by storm, lowering emissions and saving people gas money along the way.
