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Bob Kalayjian Long Beach California
Xebra Owner
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As an environmentalist I wanted to make a commitment to reducing our personal contribution of carbon emissions to the atmosphere. But could this be done without making much of a sacrifice in life style? We have two Lexus cars: my wife's small IS300 and my large LS400. The LS400 gets 15 mpg in town and 25 mpg on the highway. Living and working in Long Beach, California makes the XebraPK a good neighborhood car as I have a 13 mile roundtrip commute on surface streets, and most of our shopping is within 3 to 4 miles of home. My logic was that instead of trading the IS400 for a Prius we could keep the big Lexus for road trips and use the Xebra PK for all my town driving. The XebraPK is "half a hybrid" averaging an equivalent 116 mpg. The gasoline "half a hybrid" Lexus 400 gets 25 for an overall average of 70 mpg. This is better than a Prius!!! We will install a 3 kilowatt solar array in February that will produce three times the electricity that the PK needs. That makes our Xebra PK truly a Zero Air Polution vehicle. The cost of the Xebra PK plus the solar array will be $28,000 a little more than buying the Prius. The real bonus has been having a pickup. The PK has been very handy for home projects and gardening. I'm looking forward to the inevitable improvements to performance of this great little "motorcycle", but for now it has made a significant reduction in our impact on the environment. Bob Kalayjian |
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March 4th, 2007 Just turned 2000 miles on the PK. It is essentially in its original condition with the improvements noted before. The real update is moving it into being a truly "Zero Air Pollution" vehicle. We turned on a 2.6 kilowatt photovoltaic array on the garage roof and generate three times the electricity that the PK is using. It was great seeing the meter running backwards and knowing we did something important for the planet.
Xebra PK ready to park under the 2.6 Kilowatt PV array. The cost of the array and the Xebra PK was $28,500. The solar system is returning 5% on the investment at current electricity rate. I could have bought a Prius for that, but this just seems much, much greener. Additional news is that my hospital installed four outlets for electric vehicle charging in the doctors parking lot. This makes the effective range six miles greater or looking at it another way, I can drive much faster to work without worrying about how much juice I am draining out of the batteries. January 9th, 2007 I own one of the first 8 PKs to come into the country and have over 1100 miles on it. There were many disappointments with the construction, performance and driving characteristics, but I really like my PK!! I'm in contact with the ZAP crew regarding these issues, but wanted to share with the other owners some of my experiences and fixes to problems.
Cover for the bed - marine quality dacron, water resistant
Utility of a pickup is great addition for gardening and home projects.
Dipstick to check gear oil level - came from factory with virtually no oil in gear box. It now has about 3" on the dipstick and runs much quieter (less gear whining).
The spare tire was just hanging from the chain and broke one of the rear light mounts when the bed was lifted. In order to prevent this, I changed the bracket on the wheel from center to three inches off center and put a piece of angle steel across the rear contact points to make a three point contact for the tire. The tire now stays in place and the bed can open without hitting the rear lights.
The most impressive improvement in driving characteristics came when I improved the way the bed rests on the frame. The original hold down latches had no adjustment to them and the tabs on the bed frame broke (very poor craftsmanship and design). In this picture you can see one of six 1/2" thick rubber pads that I mounted on the frame. This required making cutouts in the plastic cover (it had been cracked on one side due to the bed hitting he plastic when bouncing over bumps). The hold down latches came from McMaster-Carr (about $30 for two) and were bolted through one of the existing attach points for the old latch. This made the ride much quieter. I guess most of the noise, rattle, etc. was the pickup bed being poorly secured.
I had to build up some support with 1 1/2" angle and 1" flat iron for the latch point. This was bolted to the pickup bed frame.
Just a point of information: The brake fluid reservoir in my PK has a sensor in it that causes a light to appear when the fluid is low. There is no mention of this in the owner's manual and when I received my PK whenever I stepped on the brake to slow down the light would come on. Finally (due to a small leak I presume) the light stayed on all the time. That is when I discovered the sensor, put a little fluid in and got things to work properly. This is actually a very nice system that alerts us when the fluid is a little low. |
