Michael Walenga works at Western Michigan University. His commute is about eight miles, and he used to take his truck.
“And it was just so expensive, maintenance and fuel,” he said.
So Walenga did what any driver would do: bought an early-aughts SUV from General Motors’ discontinued Saturn brand and converted it to run on electric power. (Saturn did briefly make a hybrid Vue, but this was not one of them.)
He’ll show the SUV at Kalamazoo’s fifth annual electric Ride and Drive on Saturday.
More and more electric vehicles are coming on the market. That’s probably good for people who want one, because converting this Saturn was complicated – even for Walenga, and he’s a mechanic.
“Everything has to be just right,” he said. “I mean you’re talking down to thousandths of an inch to make sure it lasts.”
But Walenga’s thrilled with his electric Saturn, which has a range of about 40 miles. He says it’s reliable, cheap to run and nearly maintenance-free.
“It’s great for a mechanic because mechanics don’t want to work on their own cars,” he said.
From the outside it’s hard to tell the car is electric. Walenga says he had it hooked up to a charging station at Western when he got a message from the charger that his car had been unplugged…by, as it turns out, another driver.
“I went out there, I caught the guy in the act,” he said.
“He was kind of funny cause he didn’t think it was a real electric car even though had a charging port and was plugged in. He thought maybe I did it just to get a good parking spot.”
Walenga recently sprang for a better-known electric car, the Chevy Bolt, after several years in the Saturn convinced him of the virtues of going gasoline-free. He says he still drives the converted Vue on weekends. And he might even put new batteries in it.
“I might be able to get range up to, let’s say like 100 miles, would be a little bit more usable without having to plug in somewhere,” he said.
