Senior citizen creates electric truck [Video]
Walter Yates is 85 years old. Most folks his age are taking life easy. Yates just doesn't have time for that. There's just too much to do, like the full-size replica of a 1954 Wells Fargo stage coach he built from scratch two years ago, or the helicopter he built, or the airplane he built, or the subdivision he built.
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Yates lives in the Breakaway Subdivision of Cedar Park, a unique development centered around an airstrip that residents can use for their comings and goings.
This sort of thing goes way back for Yates. With some 35 years of work as a bush pilot in Alaska and the Canadian Yukon Territory, it was only normal that 30 years ago, when he was already 55, he would land his plane on a sandbar in a river, deep in the Alaskan wilderness, build a log cabin and live in it for a full year, enduring winter cold of some 60 degrees below zero, all the while shooting film for a documentary movie -- also called "Breakaway" -- that he later produced.
So when a friend turned a gas-powered vehicle into an all-electric job, Yates just had to follow suit.
"We're not polluting a bit," Yates said, proudly surveying his converted 1998 Mazda pick-up truck. "There's just no exhaust whatsoever in this thing."
There's no exhaust because Yates and a couple of friends jerked the internal combustion engine out of the vehicle and replaced it with an electric motor, powered by 20 six-volt batteries Yates installed under the hood and beneath the truck bed, as well.
"Anytime that I drive it, I plug it in and it charges at night and the next morning, it's ready to go," he said.
A charge of just four hours readies the vehicle for a 70-mile jaunt.
Source: Senior citizen creates electric truck [Video]
