Mark Murphy's BugE electric car boasts a 17-horsepower motor that reaches 50 miles per hour and goes a mile on one cent of electricity. It can be charged at any electrical outlet.

A vehicle that can travel a mile on one cent of energy sounds like science fiction. But Mark Murphy, a former automobile product designer and now owner of Blue Sky Design in Creswell, has made that fiction a reality with the creation of his newest electric car, the BugE.

The BugE electric car is technically a motorcycle, since it has three wheels (two in front, one in back), but it has a semienclosed fairing and canopy as well as a small compartment for storage. It's a oneperson vehicle specifically designed for around-town travel that doesn't require a larger car; the BugE is perfect for a trip to the grocery store, getting to school in the morning or paying a friend a visit.

"The idea is a minimum vehicle. This is much more appropriate for a neighborhood than a big truck or an SUV" says Murphy. "It's like a life boat - it gets you around in the harbor."

Watching Murphy zip up and down the street shows that the BugE has a surprising amount of pep. It boasts a 17-horsepower motor when fully charged, which allows for a top speed of about 50 miles per hour. Charging the 48-volt battery - it plugs into any outlet with 30 cents of electricity gives the BugE about 30 miles of travel at 30 miles per hour.

It's not made for the freeway, though, and Murphy says he's not trying to compete with larger automobiles when it comes to traveling long distances, at least not with the BugE.

"I have nothing against cars, this is a completely different thing,"� says Murphy . "We've been conditioned to buy the biggest vehicle we can, but at some point that's more than you need. It's like if you had a toolbox, but the only thing in it was a hammer."

So Murphy says keep your car for when you need to make a trip up I-5 . But if you just need to travel across town and rent a movie, take the BugE and save a few bucks worth of gas and keep the air free of your fuel emissions. And since the BugE isn't necessarily designed to be anybody's sole method of transportation, Murphy has done some outside the box thinking about how to keep the cost down for the vehicle.

For that purpose, Murphy now sells the BugE as a kit that can be mailed to customers and built by them. It doesn't take any special ability to put the BugE together. It comes with instructions and only requires basic tools to build. A starter kit costs about $3,300, not including batteries or a motor, which are ordered separately. The overall cost of the BugE is about $5,000.

Aside from the low cost, according to Murphy there's a hidden advantage to building your own vehicle.

"If something on it breaks, you know how to fix it," he says.

This "non-factory" strategy occurred to Murphy after the disappointing returns of his previous electric car project, the Gizmo. This award-winning, larger model sparked interest nationally but Murphy couldn't see a way to build enough of them to make it viable, since a factory would carry a price tag of about a million bucks and the investors just weren't there.

The mail order, build-it-yourself kit model is showing early signs of vitality, as Murphy is currently selling one BugE a week around the country. This model also offers small-business opportunities to those on the receiving end, as Murphy isn't opposed to people buying the product , building it, and then turning around and selling it for a profit . Either way, it's a win-win .

"We've dispersed the factory to our customers," says Murphy. "Everybody saves, everybody wins."

More information about the BugE is available at the Blue Sky website, www.