Municipal Light Dept. will auction electric pickup truck

MARBLEHEAD-Gas was a budget-buster this year, but bidders at this week?s surplus vehicle auction have a chance to buy an early attempt to sidestep that cost.The Municipal Light Department is selling an electric pick-up truck built by employees 15 years ago to celebrate the department?s 100th anniversary.The auction will be at the town?s highway garage at 7 Tower Way Thursday at 10 a.m. The list includes two recycling trucks, a road grader, several cars, trucks and vans and a 1985 Chevrolet pickup truck with no engine, modified to be used as an electric vehicle with electric motor and batteries. The listing warns buyers, “Batteries not included.”?This is like golf cart technology. It uses a DC motor and DC batteries,” Department Manager Robert Jolly said, “but for its day we were trying to be ahead of the curve, to demonstrate that the technology was there and to get people thinking.?It was a great experiment, a learning tool for us.”As the department?s online history observes, the truck has a meaning: “Looking toward the future, the Department (built) an electric-powered truck to demonstrate the clean, quiet potential of electric transportation.”And Jolly is quick to note that the truck can be viewed as a forerunner of the hybrids in use today.In fact, he oversaw the project in 1993, when he was still the department engineer, preparing for the department centennial in 1994. Looking in a magazine called the Bargain Hunter?s Guide – a print forerunner of eBay – Jolly found a pick-up truck with a blown engine for $175, and while it was being stripped, painted and rebuilt to accommodate the heavier electric motor parts he ordered an electric motor kit that included 125-volt batteries.Over the past 15 years the department had to replace the battery pack once. However, the truck lacks power steering and heat, and it accelerates in a less-than-smooth fashion. When the battery pack needed to be replaced again, Jolly, who became department manager in 1995, decided the time had come to mothball the one-time truck of the future.However, Jolly notes, it has new tires and wheels and once a new battery pack is installed it is still capable of traveling 40-50 miles each time it is charged – preferably in the summertime when the lack of a heater won?t be an issue.?At a reasonable price a hobbyist could pick this up, fix it and use it a little around town,” he said.