"Hell-Car Burns Model’s Home," screamed the page 6 headline in the New York Post. "Veronica Webb’s eco-friendly electric car turned into a fire-spewing death machine the other night, burning down her Key West house and killing her beloved dog, Hercules."
What a lurid story — too bad a lot of it wasn’t accurate!
The ramped-up piece said that deadly fires are par for the course with eco-cars. "Firefighters who rushed to the scene told Webb that good intentions often [italics added] turn lovely homes into blazing death zones. ‘They say they see this kind of thing with electric cars all the time,’ she said. ‘Electric cars and golf carts are always overloading their chargers and burning up, but no one knows about it.’"
Gossip columnist Adam Curry, who ran the story on his Web site next to a video clip of Kylie Minogue riding a mechanical bull in her underwear, says he’s sure of it, too. "Apparently this happens all too often with electronic [sic] vehicles," he wrote.
When anything happens to a supermodel, it’s news, so Webb was soon telling her story to national TV. I saw her on with Diane Sawyer, who offered a shoulder to cry on. Webb has a flair for the dramatic. When her Azzedine jacket wore out, she described it as a "big loss."
There are more than a few holes in the story. Webb was actually in New York when the fire broke out, so it’s unlikely she talked to "firefighters who rushed to the scene" in Key West, except maybe by phone. The house was damaged by smoke; only the garage "burned down." And, most significantly, electric vehicle (EV) fires are very uncommon, and are previously unknown in Key West.
The invaluable EV World (www.EVWorld.com) spoke to Key West Fire Capt. Bob Goodreau, who was first on the scene. According to reporter Josh Landess, Goodreau said "that in his 25 years with the department, 15 as captain, this is the first time he’d seen an electric car fire, that it would surprise him greatly if anyone in the department had made such a statement about frequent EV-related fires, and that the department is small enough so that they all would know about such a fire, even if it did not occur on their shift."
Webb, who says she’s "through" with EVs ("no one warns you how dangerous they are"), owned a DaimlerChrysler GEM, a tiny neighborhood EV that looks like a golf cart and competes as an in-town runabout with the Ford Th!nk Neighbor. Reminiscent of microcars of the ’50s like the BMW Isetta and Messerschmitt Tiger (but with clean battery power compared to their dirty two-stroke gas motors), neighborhood EVs reach heady speeds of 25 miles an hour, but that’s OK because they’re restricted to 35-mile-per-hour zones in many states. You certainly wouldn’t want to take one on an interstate.
DaimlerChrysler purchased the assets of Fargo, N.D.-based Global Electric MotorCars (or GEM) to give it a vehicle that would help meet California’s 2003 low-emission mandates. Chrysler itself has managed to produce only a very expensive battery-powered minivan, so it needed a "zero-emission" entry. The $7,000 GEM is designed for gated communities, retirement homes and other enclosed uses.
I drove a GEM in Petoskey, a northern Michigan resort town where an amazing 100 of the beasts are in regular use. I found the GEM fairly crude compared to the more solidly engineered Th!nk Neighbor. I’m an EV enthusiast, obviously, but not the biggest fan of battery vehicles, because I think hybrids (and eventually fuel cells) do the job much better. Though the blaze is still being investigated, batteries are nasty things and indeed could have caused Webb’s no-doubt traumatic fire.
GEM itself doesn’t have much to say about the matter. I called the North Dakota office and got this comment: "We are still investigating, and all the facts aren’t in yet." GEM did apologize to Webb and her family. The Webb incident will set back the EV cause, but it’s ultimately a minor blip in an increasingly large radar screen.
