A week after we reported on the THINK City the Norwegians announce that the top US cities in which they are going to roll out the THINK City are Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New York. To top things off they are working with AeroVironment, Inc. to develop a fast charging system which loads the car in 15 minutes, and these fifteen minutes give you a 80% charge. That makes long distance travel with the THINK City possible, given that the charging stations are many and placed at the right locations.
In other news, Better Place, the company which is working on creating the infrastructure for your EV with switchable batteries, announced that they secured USD 350m in a series B round, and have now HSBC, Morgan Stanley Investment Management and Lazard Asset Management among their investors. That gives Better Place a value of USD 1,25 billion, which should give them the funds to develop and roll out their technology. They aim to have their solution ready for 2011 in Denmark, so we can be sure to see some of that money flow to the country on the Jutland peninsula.
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THINK is not a start-up anymore, though it was one in the beginning of the 1990s when the world experienced a similar recession. Their history is fascinating, with USD 150m invested by US car giant Ford during the companies ownership of the Norwegians, struggling after Ford sold them out in 2003, until in 2006 Norwegian Investinor and other investors bought the company. Under new management and with new strategic goals the company is ready to become a major player in the growing electric vehicle market.
Their vision is to provide a better way of moving, which is carbon and carefree. The result of their vision is an electric city car with a Scandinavian design and modern technology under the hood. The THINK City is manufactured in Finland by Valmet Automotive, who is also a shareholder and strategic partner. It seems the Finns are establishing themselves slowly but surely as a major player in the EV manufacturing segment, a very smart decision. But back to THINK.
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Last month European Batteries (EB) celebrated the opening of its doors. Phase one of the project will cost close to €40m, which is a very high figure for a startup in Finland. The company was founded in 2008 as a spin-off from FEVT (later on, in September 2009, FEVT merged back into EB). European Batteries produces large format lithium-ion battery systems for energy, industrial and vehicle applications with a range of 3 kWh up to 1 MWh in size.
I had the pleasure of a telephone conversation with EB’s new CEO Jukka Koskinen, former CEO of the Finnish company Ensto Oy, last week regarding the issues behind the chosen strategy to be a vertical battery system manufacturer (meaning that EB operates the whole production process from cells to complete system, allowing full control over the quality of the products).
EB’s business model is clever: the demand for end-products, the large format lithium-ion battery systems, is based on cost-efficient, long-lasting and safe energy storage solutions. The energy content (Wh/kg) of lithium-ion batteries is about three times that of lead-acid batteries and double that of nickel-based batteries. The key customer group during the first phase is the transportation industry, EV car and delivery van producers. Continue reading »
Electric cars are all the rage currently and in many ways its also the holy grail of Detroit and thus plays a disproportionately large role in the US politics. To get an idea of how big a role cars alone play, the federal program paid individual car owners up to $4,500 to replace their current vehicles with new ones that get higher-mileage. Whether this was just an indirect subsidy to Detroit or a real environmentally responsible policy is another discussion.
If the electric car is a hot topic in US, it could be even bigger globally if someone gets the economics right and makes a pure electric vehicle a real alternative to the combustion engine.
During our trip we visited the most talked about contender that has been claimed to be the future of car industry, Tesla Motors. I talked to Rachel Konrad, Senior Communications Manager at Tesla, in length about the car itself, the future of the industry and most interestingly is Tesla’s business model really working and making real profits for its visionary founders and investors.
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