Cape Girardeau man builds his own electric cars

 The future of the car as you know it could be getting a big charge from a man in Cape Girardeau.

Jack Rickard is getting a lot of attention in the world of electric cars and after you drive one, you can understand why.

I first met Jack in 2009 when we took a spin in his 1957 Porsche Speedster replica. It's a car that is totally electric and quite impressive.

We agreed to come back when he completed his next electric car and we did. Jack was just beginning to convert a Mini Cooper that now serves as his daily driver.

"We put in regenerative braking system in it and 112 cells or 700 pounds of batteries," Jack said. "It will go 100 miles and 100 miles an hour."

Jack has an entire garage dedicated to electric cars. It took him a year to convert the Mini. The Porsche we drove in 2009 is getting double the power. He did a electric prototype for the company that makes the Porsche replicas. And, his team added a Porsche Spyder replica that is also fully electric and would make James Dean green with envy. These cars may look like the past, but for Jack they are the future. He says it boils down to oil and the estimated two billion cars in the world by 2020.

"The rest of the world wants to drive cars just like we do," Jack said. "That's going to put a lot of pressure on the price of oil and really change the way we live in suburbia."

But why spend $15,000 converting a car to electric? Why not just buy an electric car? According to Rickard, it's not that easy.

"They've sold about 1,500 Tesla's at $150,000 a piece," he said. "There's the Chevy Volt, an electric car that runs on gasoline and the Nissan Leaf. You can't just go buy an electric car and you won't be able to for some time."

Plus, why limit yourself when you have the means to turn any car you fancy electric? Jack admits the mini was a real challenge. It's a modern car with all the amenities. It has satellite radio, air conditioning, heating, Bluetooth and an iPod adaptor. The real problem was fooling the car computer into believing it still has a gas engine, even though its engine is sitting about 20 feet away.

What it does have is 112 lithium ion phosphate batteries. Jack has crates of them from a company in China. He can't find an American company that sells them.

I took the Mini for a spin and it drives great. It has normal road manners and is extremely quiet. And, the Mini isn't going to be the end of Jack's electric projects, either. He is planning on tackling something really impressive next. We may be back to drive the world's first and only electric Cadillac Escalade!