Knocking on Doors

Sometimes I think that what I might best do is just knock randomly at doors in Point Roberts and ask the occupants to tell me about themselves: what they do and why they’re doing it here. A couple of days ago, we did approximately that and did we get a story! It wasn’t entirely random, of course, and we were invited to come to hear the story, but it wasn’t anyone I knew, although I had been introduced to him at a party once.

The P.R. resident in question lives over on the bluff on the east side of the Point, which means that his front room windows open onto a grand view of Boundary Bay, as well as the far shore down south to Bellingham, and across to the majestic Mount Baker. The sunrises, he confided, are beyond beautiful. As a late riser, I’m likely never again to see a sunrise, but I could surely imagine how beautiful they would be from this perch.

Our host is a gentleman in his mid-80’s, a retired physician (cardiac research) with a British accent. Ed first came to know of him because he is the only person on the Point with his own helicopter. Next to his house was a funny, helicopter-shaped shed where the machine was kept when not in the air. It’s empty now because he has exchanged it for a small, fixed-wing plane over at the P.R. airport. (I’m thinking about the perfect purpose for this long, thin, and now empty shed/hangar.) I first heard of him because a quilting acquaintance was working with him on his post-retirement work, which was inventing an electric car. Which he has done, complete with patents and business. You can read about his work at his company’s website.

What he’s got going is a modular car. It has two parts: the upper part with the seats, enclosure, steering, etc., is called the Ridon; the bottom part, which has the wheels, the mechanical aspects of a car, and the batteries, etc., is called the Modek. Together, they form the Ridek. The idea is that you buy the top part (which can be as stylish as you’d like it) and you lease access to the bottom part (this lower module is not really visible except for the wheels and the module has a life of about 30 years). When your battery runs low, you take the whole thing to a battery station and they exchange the bottom part of the car for a newly charged one. The bottom and top are connected by latches and the whole trade out takes a matter of minutes because, other than the mechanical connection of the latches, the breaks, and the steering, everything else connects wirelessly.

Now, this all sounds like leggos to me given my total lack of knowledge about cars and how they work, but after a couple of hours of explanation, I got it. One thing is that a battery-powered car is a lot less complex mechanically than a gas-powered car, so a lot of the parts that I vaguely think of as essential and complex would not be there…carburetors, pistons, intakes, gas tanks (certainly the last—even I can figure that out). Thus a modular mechanical car isn’t that complex a deal.

He already has an agreement with a Peruvian who wants a fleet of Rideks for use as taxis in Lima. That’s a perfect starting point because it’s a contained use: one company that owns all the Rideks and can create all the battery exchange places, with uses that involve single trips of relatively short distances. The infrastructure has to be available only in Lima. Point Roberts might be another perfect place. An entire country, though: well that’s another matter. But as we talked, I saw/I heard that he is decades ahead of me in his mind, thinking not only about how to make this happen, but also about how this will happen, whether with the Ridek or something else very much like it. I looked at the model (which includes solar panels on the roof to power the air conditioning), and thought, ‘but it doesn’t look like a car.’ And then I thought about the Model T and the SUV and how little they look alike, and the way in which change happens and happens. We live through it incrementally, but it happens over the long run, too. That is the change that he lives in, while I’m here back in the little day-to-day change. Some door to knock on!

(A final benefit of this visit is that I can now talk (if only vaguely) about V2G, which means ‘vehicle to grid.’ This is a much discussed proposal in which a world of battery-powered cars are sitting around with power stored in them that is not, at the moment, needed by the car. If they were all connected to the national power grid when parked, it could help to deal with the electricity companies peak load problem, not least because the greatest draw of power for the utilities is during those periods when the cars are likely to be sitting unused, with stored power (i.e., at night, and during work hours). Well, I said ‘only vaguely.’)