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Last year, Ian Clifford, the CEO of Canadian electric-car company ZENN Motor Company Inc., got invited to 10 Downing Street in London. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, of course, attended the private gathering, which focused on alternative modes of transport in a world increasingly rattled by carbon pollution, oil prices and the financial meltdown. It also showcased lots of electric vehicles, including the Indian-made Reva G-Wiz, the Mitsubishi i MiEV, and the sporty, but costly, Silicon Valley–engineered Tesla Roadster. Clifford’s own Zero Emission No Noise low-speed vehicle (into which comedian Rick Mercer once famously packed 20 cases of beer and which won a gold medal at the 2006 Michelin Challenge Bibendum) wasn’t at the event — but all the participants certainly knew about it.
Clifford, an earnest yet easygoing 46-year-old with the demeanor of a yoga instructor, gave his usual impassioned pitch about the coming revival of electric vehicles — or what he calls “guilt-free driving” — and renewable energy. “The writing is on the wall,” he says. “Industry has to shift, and ZENN is an enabler.” Still, after meeting Brown, Clifford couldn’t help but think: “It’s an honour to be here. But I’m sorry I’m not doing this at 24 Sussex Drive.”
That day may come, but the Toronto-born electric guru doesn’t expect any miracles in hydrocarbon-obsessed Ottawa anytime soon. No matter. Right now he’s too busy advocating for his ZENN brand — and for green solutions to oil-based problems in the United States, China and Europe. “I never imagined this when I started the company six years ago,” he says. “It’s crazy. I just shake my head.”
Clifford recently took his electric-car pitch to Jennifer Granholm, the governor of Michigan (scene of the auto industry’s crash with reality), and to select U.S. senators and congressmen in Washington during President Barack Obama’s inauguration. “It’s was like someone drew back a great cloud over the city,” he says of the historic event.
Clifford’s popularity both in and out of the market place — ZENN (TSXV: ZNN) became a publicly traded company in 2006 — owes much to a unique business plan that just might transform the global automotive industry. It all boils down to a unique energy storage system (a so-called ultra capacitor) made by a very private Texas company, EEStor Inc. Clifford has proprietary rights to the technology in perpetuity for two-thirds of the world’s car models (small and mid-size). And the device, he says, can make an electric car go as far as a gas guzzler (400 kilometres) on a single five-minute charge. “It could be really crazy,” says Hugo Marsolais, director of the Quebec Advanced Transportation Institute. “How fast could they respond to demand, and what would be the best way to adapt the technology globally?”
But that’s not all. Clifford really has his eye on 800 million cars already on the road. He wants to make them green with a ZENN conversion kit that replaces the combustion engine with both a ZENN electric drivetrain properly married to an EEStor storage unit. Mexico City’s fleet of taxis, all on a Nissan platform, Clifford says, might make a good starting point. But he’s more ambitious than that. “When I see the millionth electric car on the road, this thing will take on unstoppable momentum, and I will know I have been successful,” he adds. And, yes, Clifford can envision electric planes. He also wants to change the world.
Not surprisingly, Clifford has some competition these days. Plans or designs for electric or hybrid vehicles, such as GM’s much-hyped Chevy Volt, now dominate the automotive press. Even luxury carmakers such as Mercedes-Benz propose to diminish fossil-fuel use with plans for electric, hybrid and super-efficient diesel vehicles. The Israeli-born Shai Agassi, a high-tech entrepreneur just like Clifford, also has bold plans. With US$200 million in startup capital, Agassi’s Better Place company proposes to lease electric batteries to consumers (the most expensive component of any electric vehicle) and then set up a reliable network for recharging or replacing them. Israel, Denmark. Hawaii and the province of Ontario have all signed deals with Better Place in the hopes of keeping energy dollars at home by using local wind or solar sources to power green cars. Although Clifford shares Agassi’s mission to end the petroleum fuel monopoly, he thinks that ZENN ultimately has a better plan: “It’s all about the battery.”
Mould-breakers rarely fit any stereotype, other than sharing some luck and being at the right place at the right time. And Clifford is definitely one of those. “I’ve always been intrigued by innovation and being at the edge,” he says. At the age of 18, he got an opportunity to work alongside the great landscape photographer Ansel Adams in Yosemite and Big Sur, Calif. He then parlayed that “eye-opening” experience into a successful career as a commercial photographer. In 1995, Clifford caught the early Internet wave when he co-founded digIT Interactive, a firm that pioneered Internet marketing in Canada. With impeccable timing, he sold the successful firm to Quebecor for an undisclosed sum in 2000, just six months before the Internet boom went bust.
Clifford’s aha moment with green energy occurred in downtown Toronto in 1995. After getting stuck in traffic and breathing smoggy air one sweltering afternoon, he decided to ditch his carbon-spewing SUV for his “children’s sake.” After a fruitless search for a GM EV1, the famous electric car of the 1990s that became the subject of the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?, Clifford settled on a Henney Kilowatt that ran on 800 pounds of lead-acid batteries. He bought his first electric vehicle from a former pilot in Connecticut, who drove a Henney in the body of an old Renault Dauphine to the airport every day for 35 years. Whenever Clifford parked the sleek-looking vehicle in downtown Toronto, 20 people would swarm the red apparition, exclaiming “What in the world is that?”Most then asked, “How do I get one?”
By now, Clifford had also delved into the surprisingly long and dramatic history of electric vehicles. A Scottish inventor, Robert Anderson, actually cobbled together the first electric carriage in the 1830s, and by the 1890s a variety of models travelled urban roads. Women, in particular, adored the vehicles. “They were like sitting parlours, where three or four women could talk and enjoy the quiet as they went shopping,” says Clifford. New York City even boasted an electric cab fleet in 1897, and nearly one-third of the cars in America’s major cities by 1900 were green machines powered by cumbersome lead-acid batteries. But the invention of the electric starter motor soon made the internal combustion engine even more female-friendly by disposing of the hand crank. Cheap oil, Henry Ford, and the promise of unlimited mobility ultimately spelled the death of the electric car.
Clifford discovered something extraordinary when his Henney broke down. He had to look in the Yellow Pages under Fork Lifts to find a repairman. That’s when he realized that “there were millions of electric vehicles being driven around in warehouses behind closed doors.” In other words, the technology hadn’t really died — it just went off road. Shortly afterward, Clifford and two associates started the Feel Good Cars Inc., which later morphed into ZENN. It bought old Renaults and sold them as refurbished electric cars. When just one appearance at the Canadian International AutoShow in Toronto resulted in 1,000 test-drive requests and 15 sales, Clifford realized that a cottage electric-car business was “unsustainable,” so he started to think about mass production.
Although SUVs still ruled the highways, Clifford adapted a French diesel Microcar in 2002 into a low-speed electric vehicle, the Zero Emission No Noise. It was small, used cheap lead-acid batteries and went 60 km on an eight-hour charge. One California website recently described the product as “a Canadian-made mini-mobile that looks like a Matchbox car, drives like a go-cart and saves money like bar soap.” A 40,000-square-foot manufacturing plant in Saint-Jérôme, Que., 70 km northwest of Montreal, now produces about three low-speeders a day.
All the media hoopla about the splashy Renaults brought Clifford to the attention of Dick Weir and Carl Nelson, two former hard-disc developers in Austin, Texas, both in their 60s. Since the 1990s, the pair had been trying to improve the storage capacity of electric batteries the same way hard discs had revolutionized the storage of data. Clifford, of course, now recognized that batteries for electric cars were generally expensive, toxic, and didn’t perform well in extreme temperatures. In fact, batteries remained the central obstacle to making electric cars market friendly. “Weir and Nelson talked to the Big Three, and then the phone rang,” says Clifford. His company was then one of the only makers of electric cars in North America. “It was serendipity,” Clifford says. “It was timing.”
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