I’ve driven onto Interstate-84 westbound from the Capitol Avenue entrance in Hartford easily a couple of thousand times over the years, with its two on-ramps merging on a curve, then an uphill climb into the left lane of the highway.
Naturally, that’s where I headed on Wednesday when I pulled out of the state Capitol parking lot as one of the first drivers in the state to try out the new, 800-horsepower Rivian R1T pickup truck. What happened next, I did not expect.
A couple of hours earlier, I had taken an e-bike for a spin around Bushnell Park on a postcard spring day, and found the Radpower model owned by my Woodbridge bicycle activist friend Kate Rozen to have more power than I figured it would. Those bikes with a light electric motor to boost pedaling are a blast — and competition is creating some reasonably priced versions.
It was Electric Vehicle Day at the Capitol. EV folks of all stripes gathered to talk up their favored bills, which could pass or die over the next three weeks, and show off their goods: e-bikes; affordable Tesla models; an all-electric school bus from Dattco; a $169,000 Lucid Motors Air Dream Edition luxury sedan; electric mopeds designed and made in Branford by Spark Cycleworks.
And the Rivian heavy-duty pickup, in a sort of Army-esque color known as “launch green.”
“This is the first ever electric pickup on the market,” said John Stephenson, the Rivian director of state policy, who drove the vehicle up from metro DC Tuesday night with a colleague, Kaitlin Monaghan. “It can tow 11,000 pounds.”
You may have heard about Rivian’s initial public offering of stock on the Nasdaq exchange last November, when the company shot up to a value of $150 billion, making it briefly one of the most valuable corporations on the planet — not bad for a business that delivered just a few thousand vehicles in 2021. Now Rivian has joined Tesla’s 7-year quest to change Connecticut’s century-old law barring direct sales from the manufacturer to consumers.
Seeing the features on the $73,000 vehicle in-person, folks like state Sen. Kevin Witkos, R-Canton, who gave it close scrutiny, had to figure Rivian thought of every detail, down to the pull-down utility seat on the side of the body.
‘84 miles an hour, is that real?’
Turning onto the I-84 ramp, I kept my foot firmly on the gas pedal — er, the accelerator — as the four motors, each attached to a wheel, took over. State Sen. Will Haskell, D-Westport, chief sponsor of key bills to advance electric vehicles, rode in the passenger seat.
“Wow…whoa,” we both said at once.
“Zero to 60 in three seconds,” Monaghan, manager of public policy and a senior counsel at Rivian, said nonchalantly from the back seat.
“Zero to 60 in three seconds?” Haskell repeats. I had heard that stat but feeling it in a heavy truck was something different.
“It can outrun almost any Ferrari ever made,” Monaghan said.
Even heading up the hill, we rolled past cars in the next lane.
“Whoa!!!!”
“This is unbelievable,” I said.
“This is pretty fun,” Haskell added. That’s not the usual comment in a test drive for the cars I tend to buy.
Just a few seconds had passed. “Look at this, 84 miles an hour, is that real?” I said, reading the speedometer. “It doesn’t feel like it at all.”
I almost never hit the brakes. Pull back from the acelerator and the motors act as steady brakes as part of the electric flow.
Haskell asks Monaghan about rising demand as gasoline prices headed over $4 a gallon.
“Overall there’s an increased interest in going electric, which we’re really excited about,” she said. “But also, knowing where your fuel is coming from. So, when you plug in an electric vehicle, you know you’re getting electricity from the U.S., from the grid, whereas when you go to the gas pump, you’re not sure where the gasoline is coming from.”
“I really think that the more people who ride in these things the more supporters there are for EV’s. Because you think about EV’s, I think about the Prius that my mom bought after seeing An Inconvenient Truth, but this is a very different kind of car.”
Changing the culture
A very different kind of car, and, on the other side of the state Capitol, a very different kind of bicycle. That’s the point I took away from EV Day.
A lot of trends are coming together here: Technology that makes this stuff not just cleaner but better performing than internal combustion gasoline engines; business models bringing prices down and more companies on the market; and mostly, a sense among we the locomoting people that soon enough, EV’s will be no more a novelty than laptops and mobile devices.
“For me, the most important thing is the school buses,” said Thomas LeFebvre, coordinator of the Transport Hartford project for the Center for Latino Progress, who organized the e-bike demonstration day, with a dozen or so exhibitors, along with activist Kate Rozen.
That’s because buses now run on unclean diesel fuel, and hit hard in low-income areas, which hurt the cause of environmental justice.
One of the three main EV-related bills wending through the General Assembly would create targets and incentives for replacing school buses by 2030. That bill would also give subsidy vouchers for commercial truck fleets looking to convert to electric; and dedicate an $8 million-a-year fund from the state greenhouse gas fee on motor vehicle registrations to go toward EV rebates — including for e-bikes.
The e-bike rebate would be $500, only for models that cost less than $3,000. Motor vehicle rebates would be $5,000, up from $2,000, for vehicles up to $50,000, up from $42,000, with bonus incentives for people in environmentally threatened communities. Haskell, the transportation committee co-chair, argues that e-bikes can replace cars in some households — a stretch, but maybe.
Another main bill would strengthen the electric grid for EV charging stations and would add Connecticut to the list of states joining in the California emissions standards for medium- and heavy-duty trucks, setting zero-emission fleet standards by 2030.
Direct sales to customers
“We have to be screaming from the rooftops that we need to be focused on EV issues,” said Sen. Christine Cohen, D-Guilford, the environment committee co-chair and a key sponsor, as she perused te Spark Cycleworks tent. “Now is the time to do it. If we don’t get this done, we’re basically waving goodbye to federal subsidies.”
Those bills are merging into one big EV measure, a tough but doable climb by the May 4 end of the session. Opponents will say the free market needs to lead the way. That’s happening too, though it could use a bit of prodding, like those little motors add to bikes when you pedal.
Speaking of the free market, the direct-sales bill, previously known as the Tesla bill, is past due for adoption. We’ve been over the arguments on both sides and we will do it again, but suffice to say, the world is changing.
Cohen declared her support for direct sales on Wednesday, for the first time. “We really need to wake up and start paying attention in lowering emissions and this is a way to do it,” she said. “It’s a free market, we need to make it work.”
Rivian is pushing hard. “We want to have a new type of customer experience,” Stephenson, the state policy director, tells me.
Ultimately the product has to take off on the market, which seems to be happening based on early reviews. Rivian would set up stores in Connecticut as soon as this year, he said, as manufacturing ramps up with a converted former Mitsubishi factory in Illinois and a new one planned in Georgia.
“We will have a lot of stores to meet demand,” Stephenson said.
