From 1993 gas-guzzler to solar-powered vehicle... Rosemary Penwarden has been driving around Otago in a self-converted electric car for the past two-and-a-half years.
She tells Anna Thomas that converting the old car is one of the "best things I've ever done".
“My biggest motivation to do this was to show that it can be done.”
Rosemary Penwarden with her self-converted electric vehicle Photo: Supplied
It all started when some people taunted Penwarden about using a petrol car when she joined protests against deep-sea drilling in the Southern Ocean.
“I got kind of sick of that, it was kind of a funny thing that they were trying to say. I thought ‘well, actually I know someone who has just made an electric car’.
“Then I’d really like to thank Anadarko, and Shell before them and New Zealand Oil & Gas, and OMV and Beach Energy were the latest ones here in the south who wanted to drill in our ocean – it’s really them that motivated me to just let them know that they’re not really needed, we can do this stuff.”
Knowing the right people and being “a little bit mad” helped her get started, she says.
“[The used car] came from a firefighter from Canterbury who saved it from being squashed and he was going to do this and he’d actually taken the engine out already but then he put it on TradeMe … and I saw it and I thought ‘yes, I’m going to do it’ and that’s how it started.”
Despite the sarcasm and eye-rolls she was met with, she persisted to make the conversion happen.
“Luckily, a couple of years beforehand, I’d found a garage that wasn’t being used and I’d spoken to the owner and I’d collected probably over a year … a bunch of really skilled people who thought ‘yeah, let’s make some kind of co-operative workspace’ and that was already on the go by the time I brought my little car in.
“And there was Steve Ward, he can do anything to a car with his eyes shut and he helped me put a gearbox back into where gearboxes should go because I needed that for the adaptor plate that held the electric motor.”
Penwarden estimates it has cost her about $24,000 in total so far.
But she says these costs are one of the barriers to being able to convert vehicles to solar power on a larger scale in New Zealand.
“All my friends and the ones who are skilled and who were able to oversee this, they were doing it all for free and they need to paid and they’ve got mortgages and at the moment it’s just not possible to do this.
“Unless there’s someone willing to give all of their time for free, it’s not feasible.
“At the moment, you get a clean car discounting for imported EVs, which is fantastic, it has actually kickstarted this transition that we need.
“Well there’s a lot of really shiny, quite brand-new double cab utes driving around our roads, now are we just going to let them continue driving around our roads for 40 more years or however long they last.
“They’ve got expensive bodies. They could be converted with some really great batteries and that would increase their life and it would save a whole lot of emissions.”
She has travelled more than 23,000 kilometres in her car, which she estimates to be the equivalent of nine round trips from Dunedin to Auckland.
“I’ve saved six tonnes of carbon dioxide from going into the atmosphere which is really lovely and it makes me feel good but every day I watch a coal train go around beautiful Blueskin Bay, that carries coal to one of Fonterra’s factories … the coal in that train will send 183 times more CO2 into the atmosphere that I’ve saved in two and a half years from driving my car.”
Fonterra is looking to phase out coal altogether by 2037 and plans to phase out coal use at its Stirling cheese plant in Otago by August.
Now, Penwarden is looking at possible conversion kits for fossil fuel vehicles.
“It’s part of the circular economy they [the government] keep talking about and it means instead of bringing in a whole lot of new stuff we can use what we’ve got, so I’m working on that right now.”
