Twitter headlines« Verizon Doubles Hybrid Sedan Fleet to 200 Units | Main | Study Finds PM and Ozone Levels Cost California Economy $28 Billion Annually »
Reva Scaling Production to 30,000 BEVs per Year
13 November 2008
In an interview with the UK’s BusinessGreen, Reva chief technology officer Chetan Maini said that the company was scaling its EV production capacity to 30,000 units per year from the current 6,000.
Reva, an India-based electric car maker, manufacturers the G-Wiz on sale in the UK. The company currently has 2,300 vehicles on the road.
Everyone knows how to build the brakes and the bodies and the chassis. The tough part is, how do you get the electronic and electrical systems to work, how do you make it cost-effective, and how do you make it reliable and efficient enough? We also have some unique flexible manufacturing processes that help us hit price-performance targets that are superior to most. Long-term, for any green technology to be successful, you can’t expect customers to pay a premium.
We are at a nascent stage for this technology and nascent technologies need support. If there was a long-term favourable policy, you would see investments come in that would make the difference. A good example is what happened in China. In 1999, there were 40,000 electric two-wheelers in China. The government said that by the 2008 Olympics, it needed to change certain parts of the transport system. It put in a $100m fund, put policies in place, such as banning petrol mopeds, but not electric scooters, in parts of city centres, and last year there were 15 million electric scooters in China. With that volume, the scooters became so inexpensive that even in areas where there is no regulatory requirement, 70 per cent choose electric. It struck a long-term policy...We believe we have a product that can exist on its own merits, but incentives would help to create the infrastructure that would make it easier to own—to be able to recharge the car at the shops, or at work.
(A hat-tip to Kristoff!)
November 13, 2008 in Brief | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Comments
Posted by: HarveyD | November 13, 2008 at 01:33 PM
This rare interview with Reva CTO, Chetan Maini gives a fascinating insight into the history & development of the Reva Quadricycle EV.
His interest in EVs was sparked when he was at the University of Michigan in 1990 & had a chance to be part of a solar electric car race.
"We raced from Florida to Michigan, and our university team came first. General Motors then sponsored us in the 2,000-mile World Solar Challenge from Darwin to Adelaide in Australia. We were just a bunch of kids from college, but we came third in the world, right behind Honda. That seemed very exciting to me. If you could cross a continent with solar energy, this technology had to have a great future."
The story of Reva illustrates that a solar car race for students and sponsorship of the winning team by GM in the world solar challenge can lead to talented students setting up a business to develop a practical EV.
I find it revealing that the young students sponsored by GM saw a future for EVs that the older generation of board members at GM failed to see when they decided to crush the EV1.
Reva was founded in 1994 & they then spent seven years in development before launching the Reva quadricycle in India, in 2001.
Reva has taken seven years to get 2,300 EVs on the road, now has a capacity of 6,000 EVs per year and next plans to build 30,000 per year in a new plant which will be up and running by the middle of next year.
Posted by: Kristoff | November 13, 2008 at 09:14 PM
GM promotion and destruction of EVs on about the same day is indicative of GM's mismanagement and dishonesty.
How can we trust those people with $25+ B of Americans' tax money?
There's a movement in Canada to let the Big-3 (their managers and agressive labour unions) die quickly and peacefully while supporting more productive-responsive better managed manufacturers such as Toyota + Honda + VW and new electrified vehicles + battery pack manufacturers.
Will USA have a similar movement soon?
Posted by: HarveyD | November 15, 2008 at 09:33 AM
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341c4fbe53ef010535ecff06970b
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Reva Scaling Production to 30,000 BEVs per Year:
Thank you Kristoff for an informative article.
Yes, there are at least half a dozen effective ways to promote the purchase of electrified vehicles.
The French malus-bonus system will most probably have success too.
A much higher progressive tax on fossil liquid fuels coupled with a meaningful subsidy for the purchase of an electrified vehicle would also work.
A London style fee to drive down town with a polluting gas guzzler was sucessful.
Yearly registration fees based on vehicle yearly GHG emissions would also help. Something like $50/tonne/year for the first year going up to $100/tonne/year after 5 years would do it.
Raising CAFE by as much as 8% to 10% per year could convince car manufacturers to to better or make room for somebody else.
A good promotion program could use many of the above and would make very low (below 60 g/Km) and zero polution electrified vehicles cheaper to buy and operate than ICE units.