The new car will be sold alongside the existing car and not replace it. The plan is to have the lead acid batteries as the 'entry level' option and the lithium-ion batteries as the premium option.
When I spoke to Keith Johnston about this last week, he told me that the 120km (75 mile) range was a genuine range that owners should be able to achieve on their cars without having to resort to 'ultra-economy' driving. The cars have been on test for quite some time and tested in a variety of conditions.
Incidentally, this press release is for Europe only. India will receive the lithium-ion option later on this year.
Lithium ion batteries are not cheap. Reva are currently looking at different options to keep the lithium ion version of the car as affordable as possible. Of course with the banks not lending money at the moment, it makes a leasing plan more difficult to arrange.
We won't have to wait long (I hope!) before the costs are finally sorted out and we'll know how much lithium ion batteries will cost.
As to upgrades for older models, I shall find out what the current plan is for that. Reva have always said that they wouldn't have an upgrade path for the original dc-drive car so I suspect there will be no change there.
What is actually more exciting to me is the fast charging points. I'm talking to three companies at the moment about fast charging networks and I think we'll see some good progress in this regard in the next eighteen months or so.
Fast chargers aren't cheap - don't expect to get one thrown in free with your car - and as a result, Reva are targetting these at fleet users and local government authorities. However, it got me thinking. Have a look at this map:
This map shows a fifty mile radius of Central London. In theory, a lithium-ion powered Reva could drive to any of these points from Central London without requiring a recharge.
Now that is fine, so long as you can park your car and leave it on charge for a few hours at the other end of your journey. But what if you wanted to go further than 50 miles?
If you look at the main roads that leave London, there aren't that many of them: I can count eleven in total - the M11, the A12, M2, M20, A23, A3, M3, M4, M40, M1 and the A1(M). Okay, so you could probably count the A303 as well if you wanted making it twelve.
If fast charging points could be installed at around the 50 mile mark along these roads, most of the South of England and South Midlands becomes accessible from a lithium-ion powered Reva starting from Central London.
Taking this further:
Drawing a similar circle around Birmingham, Bristol and Manchester, you only need a further 13 charging points strategically placed around all these cities to extend the range of the cars even further afield.
Of course, you would need to then start filling in the gaps as well - fast charging points in major cities and towns - but my point is that with a relatively small network you could start opening up the possibilities of electric cars.
It would mean that for people who only occasionally drive longer distances, they could quite feasibly ditch the internal combustion engine and use an electric car all the time.
Posted: 04 Jan 2009 09:58