The buzz is all about electric cars. But Tedd Abramson says that is thinking too small. His target is an electric truck.

Mr. Abramson, president and chief executive of Electrorides, Inc., was at the U.S. Capitol last Thursday, behind the wheel of a delivery truck whose gasoline engine was replaced with a 100-kilowatt motor. (For unreformed gear-heads, that’s 134 horsepower.)

Electrorides, Inc., is trying to market its fleet of electric trucks to Congress. (Photo: Electrorides)

In the back, located under the truck’s bed and between the frame rails, were lithium-ion batteries that carried 65 kilowatt-hours of energy — about as much as a typical house uses in three weeks.

His immediate target in Washington is the House of Representatives, where Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker from California, has been waging a campaign to “green the Capitol.”

The House runs several trucks around the Capitol Hill complex, which includes hundreds of offices spread out in several major buildings.

Mr. Abramson’s vehicle, called the ZeroTruck, has no direct carbon emissions — though, of course, the electricity has to come from somewhere. At the national average for the electric generating system, the truck would produce about a pound and a half of carbon dioxide per mile traveled, vs. nearly 2 pounds running on gasoline, at 10 miles per gallon. But it would dump no smog-causing nitrogen oxides or particles into the streets, and over time, the electric system is likely to get cleaner.

Making trucks more efficient has proved something of a challenge. As my colleague, Kate Galbraith, noted in November, T. Boone Pickens, the oilman-cum-renewables-enthusiast, has been fond of saying “a battery won’t move an 18-wheeler.”

The cost and size of batteries needed to propel large vehicles has long been an obstacle to truck electrification, but advances in battery technology are making it more and more feasible. Delivery companies have been experimenting with hybrid alternatives for some time. And Southern California Edison, Kate noted, has had a plug-in hybrid utility truck in its fleet for over five years.

The ZeroTruck, however, is all electric. With no internal combustion engine, the vehicle is a symphony of normally overlooked sounds, like the ones produced by the tires on the pavement, and the pumps that run the power steering and hydraulic brakes.

In the cab, an add-on meter shows the state of charge of the batteries and their temperature. The tachometer measures motor speed, although Mr. Abramson plans subsequent models with no transmission, so the motor will turn at the same speed as the wheels.

The price for the ZeroTruck is about $125,000, Mr. Abramson said. That may sound like a lot, but if diesel fuel were $5 a gallon, as it was recently, the car could pay for itself in just five years, he said.

At the current price for diesel, closer to $2.50, payoff is much longer.

But like other electric vehicles, operating costs are lower because there is no oil to change, and the electric motor does a lot of the work ordinarily done by brakes, when it captures momentum and turns that back into electric current for the batteries.

Charging at 240 volts – the kind of circuit an electric oven uses – takes 8 hours. But a third-party vendor, Etech, of Phoenix, offers a charging unit that will run at 480 volts and do the job in one hour, Mr. Abramson said, adding that he hoped a sale would be approved soon by the city council of Santa Monica, Calif. — and then by the House.

Mr. Abramson, who managed JetBlue’s spare parts inventory in California before leaving a few months ago to take a stab at the electric truck business, converted this one at a shop in Ontario, Calif. He brought it east on the back of a trailer, since its range is only around 70 miles on a charge. The truck that towed it — a gasoline model — had a bumper sticker: “Fed up with gas prices? Electric cars – for a change.”

“When people want something and no one else is building it,” Mr. Abramson said, “I’m going to give it a shot.”