Inventors Create Kayak Cars

This summer's third annual Sunblast Symposium in Steamboat Springs, Colo.—an annual venue for electric car builders to pit their technology head-to-head—saw a dozen vehicles from throughout the Rocky Mountains. Surprising everyone involved, two of those cars were made from kayaks. "They make really good racing bodies," says builder and event organizer Johnny Walker, an industrial arts teacher at Steamboat Springs Middle School. "The old ones work even better because you can get more of the car body inside the hull."

Walker started his students on the electric car project five years ago in his Applied Technology class. As a part-time, recreational kayaker, the idea to turn a kayak into a car came naturally, but his wasn't the only electric kayak entered in the event. "It was a coincidence that there were two kayak cars entered," he says. Walker's Lite-Wave electric kayak car was built from a donated Old Town fiberglass kayak. The other kayak car, built by Charlie Holthausen and his kids Matthew and Laura, was made from a Wave Sport Kinetic. He called his car Kinetic Energy. "The aerodynamics of kayaks are phenomenal," says Holthausen. "If it can slip through the water smoothly, it can slip through the air smoothly."

Constructing an electric car out of a kayak, of course, isn't easy. For the Sunblast event, cars had to meet Formula Electrolite electric road-racer specifications, carry a designated amount of weight and batteries, and many cost up to $2,000 each to build. The cars were judged not for finishing position, but for how far they traveled in one hour. How did the kayak cars fare against the more conventional car bodies? The Lite Wave crashed and burned and is currently under reconstruction at the Middle School; and the Kinetic Energy threw a chain halfway through the race.
—ahb