The Electric Stars 153
liked it. “There are three electric cars sitting on the Moon,
and now another one in my garage,” Hanks said. “The
eBox makes even more sense in Los Angeles than in the
Taurus-Littrow Valley of the Moon. I can drive all weekend,
hauling dogs and helping my friends move, and the only
reason I’ll need to stop at a gas station is for beef jerky and
lottery tickets.”^192 Ironically, it was engineers from General
Motors who came up with the best design for the electric
Lunar Rover that drove around on the Moon.^348
AC Propulsion was responsible for converting the Toy-
ota Scion xB to the electric eBox. Alan “Al” Cocconi, thus
the AC in the company name, founded the company in
- Cocconi had earlier worked with the now crushed
EV1. He designed the first prototype in his garage. But as
General Motors didn’t believe in the EV1, he decided to
make a better car on his own.
Cocconi bought a Piontek kit car, converted it to elec-
tric power, and renamed it to tzero. “We designed it to
show that ultimate performance is available for electric
vehicle technology,” Cocconi said. The plan was that the
tzero would be the first in a series of the next generation
environmental friendly vehicles. The name tzero originates
from the engineering term t0, which indicates the first mea-
surement of time in a sequence of several measurements,
where t1 is the next measurement, and so on.
It was the tzero that convinced Hanks to buy an eBox.
“I drove their tzero electric sports car a few years ago, so
when they put the same technology in a four-door I wanted
one for myself,” he said.^219 The yellow tzero wouldn’t win