Electric Car Company Citroen Ev'ie tested, slow and dubious reliability
About a month ago we first heard about the Electric Car Company in the UK starting sales of its Ev'ie. The Ev'ie is a Citroen C1 converted to full battery electric drive. ECC actually has a deal with Citroen UK to buy cars direct from the factory for conversion and does all the work at its London shopFollowing in the path of other converters, ECC is apparently learning that building and debugging such a vehicle is far more complicated than it might first appear. British EV enthusiast and blogger Nikki decided to make the trip from her Bristol home to London to try out the Ev'ie.
Nikki chronicled her unfortunately unhappy experience attemping to drive the electric mini-car. While the C1-based Ev'ie is a larger, roomier and much better trimmed out machine than quadricycles like G-Wiz, the electric powertrain did not live up to its billing. Excruciatingly slow acceleration was followed by premature halt to the festivities when the car would simply not go any further after a mere 7 miles. It's still not known exactly what the issue was since the car gave no indication of what the problem might be. The ECC representative suspects overheating, but claimed that this had never occurred before. Hopefully they will get it sorted out before actually delivering cars to customers.
Gallery: Electric Car Corporation Ev'ie
[Source: A Minor Journey]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
gorr 1:29PM (5/29/2009)
Batteries will never do a good job of powering a car, manufacturers have said so many times before been bought by big oil and goverment taxmoney for themself while lauphing at the consumers. It don't store electricity, it store complicated chemicals and costly electrodes with few power that enter slowly and leave slowly with high internal resistances. It's just good for backing power in case of emergency. Nobody run anything on batteries without severe limitations and cost. Many bloggers here and in this site works for high financial gimmicks.
Hydrogen battery( called fuelcell) is ready for commercialisation and wide spread use in cars, trucks and many other things as said by gm and toyota some years ago.
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Phil 2:27PM (5/29/2009)
haha, you want slow power delievery, then fuel cells are for you! They all have to be mated with a large battery because they can't even come close to delivering peak output. And how's the price of platinum doing? I'd bet it's still high enough to make any fuel cell for a car cost at least half a million dollars.
Snoopy 2:31AM (6/01/2009)
gorr,
I hate to burst your bubble, but if hydrogen is so ready for primetime, why isn't it available everywhere already?
If companies as big as GM and Toyota are ready to go with their hydrogen cars, why aren't they making them available? Why aren't they just buying up all the independent gas stations that have closed for various economic reasons over the past few years and turned them into hydrogen stations? Think about it, they could sell the cars and sell the fuel for them too! They'd make a killing!
But wait... They haven't. Why?
Was it Big Oil? Couldn't be. They've been in bed with Big Oil for years, right? Heck, if anything, the folks from Big Oil, GM and Toyota would get together and corner the hydrogen market. I know if I had this awesome technology available years ago, when I had the money to do it, I'd spend that money on the infrastructure and build hydrogen stations across Canada and the U.S. and build my hydrogen empire!
But wait... They haven't.
Nothing against hydrogen, if it works. It's just not ready for primetime yet. And I don't have $2 million for a Honda FCX Clarity http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/13/business/fi-neil13.
Steve 4:54PM (5/29/2009)
Havign read Nikki's blog it doesnt look good for the Evie. I am another that got excited when they announced the car, and have been waiting for the first reviews to hit the blogs. Now they are looking like so many of the other slightly sad over hyped attempts people have made in the past.
How come so many amateurs can make succesfull EV conversions at home, yet as soon as someone tries to throw money at it and commercialize it seems doomed to failure :(
And as a footnote.
Cant anyone around here read
"Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry"
Off Topic rants about Hydrogen, or whatever your current favorite alternative technology, is NOT relevant to the post, and is frankly getting pretty boring.
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Hans Wurst 12:50PM (5/30/2009)
>How come so many amateurs can make succesfull EV conversions at home
Maybe it just seems that way because you only hear from them when they're all fired up from having this grand plan, working on it, or doing their first test drive or some such.
You don't usually hear them talk much about the ongoing need for tinkering, and how quickly some of the batteries start to go bad, taking the whole pack down, and so on...
You can only sort of gather that part from the forums where issues are discussed and maybe from used conversion sales.
I'd love for EVs to become reliable at a decent price, but right now you have to love to tinker AND have quite some extra cash to throw at it.
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Snoopy 2:35AM (6/01/2009)
Personally, I'm waiting for either the i-MiEV or one of the Better Place vehicles.
As far as the small-time guys go, those are some very good points.
Mark 7:06AM (5/30/2009)
Conversions are always a problem because you have to mix and match parts. This is not only a problem for EVs but here in Italy many people converted cars from petrol to LPG (GPL) and they had problems, to companies like Fiat started selling cars which had LPG engines installed and these cars have shown no problems at all.
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