It’s been a long time coming, but be in no doubt that the electric vehicle (EV) revolution is finally upon us. What makes us so sure? We’ve seen Ford’s first EV coming down a production line, and actually driven it on public roads.
While
GM has long stolen headlines in the US with its Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid,
cross-town rival Ford now looks set to beat it to market with a humble Transit van.
It might not be Aptera-sexy, but its impact on the environment – especially in
cities – could be in a different league to the trailblazers currently in the market, like Tesla.
Whereas
most car drivers still worry about the range limitations inherent to electric vehicles,
with a van or small truck – where daily routes tend to be predictable, and well
under 100 miles a day in urban settings, ‘range anxiety’ for the driver
practically disappears. Ford’s move to make its first mass-market electric
vehicle a van, therefore seems smart – especially as many will go into big
fleets, where operators can closely monitor vehicles and provide detailed feedback
on the performance of what is still quite new technology.
First Ford Transit Connect BEV (here as Tourneo - a crew version) for the US, on the ramps in Smith factory
The Transit Connect BEV as Ford calls it, goes on sale in North America in 2010, but the first vehicles to hit American shores are rolling down a production line right now - in a factory in North-East England, where they’re built by Smith Electric Vehicles. Earlier this week, Smith’s Dan Jenkins showed us the first Ford Transit Tourneo Connect BEV on the production line floor, which you can see in this video below:
Smith
has a long history of building electric vehicles, with a number of big-brand
customers in Europe such as Sainsbury’s (supermarket), TNT (deliveries), and TK
Maxx (retail) already using its vehicles in their fleets. They’ve been converting Ford
vans for some years, so the official partnership between Smith and Ford that
was announced last year – which will ultimately see electric Transits being
built in a factory in Kansas City, seems logical.
The real proof of the pudding is in the eating though, and having seen the first production vehicle on the factory floor (see video above), we then got to drive Smith’s demonstrator prototype, fresh from a tour where it was shown to people like Californian Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. As you’ll see in our video (below), from the back seat, the feeling of traveling at 50 miles per hour in a vehicle with no engine noise, feels more than “a little star trek”. But the real story is that, from behind the wheel, the Transit Connect BEV drives just like a regular car or van, only one that’s much simpler to operate, and much quieter on the move. We've driven the future, and it's electric:
Check out more videos from the day we spent with Smith on our Blip TV channel - and watch this space for more blogs and videos on this subject, which we're following very closely. All Movement Design Bureau material is available for republication under a Sharealike Creative Commons 3.0 license.
Posted by Joseph Simpson on the 21st August 2009
Images - Robb Hunter
Disclosure - Ford is sponsoring The Movement Design Bureau's design and research work in 2009 - however we have an independent brief and say what we think. If you disagree, we want to hear from you. Thanks to all at Smith - and especially Dan Jenkins - for giving up their time to show us round the factory.
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