Elektromotive managing director Calvey Taylor-Haw and technical director Greg Simmons talk electric vehicle commuting, recharging points, battery life, Renault/Better Place battery swap plans and even motorsport with Farah Alkhalisi.
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FA: Let’s start with your mission statement. What’s your vision?
CT-H: I’m passionate about seeing a really comprehensive electric vehicle recharging infrastructure throughout the whole of the UK. Not only in the streets, but in the car parks and at homes and in workplaces as well. The majority of charging probably will be done at home and at workplaces, but the public infrastructure on the streets is necessary, a lot of it just to dispel any range anxiety.
FA: What do you drive yourself?
C-TH: I drive a Smart Fortwo ed, my company car for local journeys and commuting, and I also have a motorcycle. And an Audi A4 Avant for longer journeys.
GS: My daily commute is 46 miles, a round trip. We have two offices, one at the Sussex University campus and the other at Littlehampton, and I’m running between the two. When you’re in slow traffic, that’s when these things (Smart eds) perform the best.
FA: What’s your background?
CT-H: Advertising and marketing. I’m not from an engineering background but I do have a great interest in cars and mechanical things… when I was looking to make a career change, I wanted to do something within the automotive industry. But I was also interested in environmental issues, including eco-friendly housing and micro-generation of electricity. Then I suddenly realised that you needed to have a refuelling infrastructure for electric vehicles.
GS: I’m a mechanical engineer. Fifteen years in professional motorsport, at Penske and a local team (Arena International Motorsport) based at Littlehampton that run the Fords in the BTCC. We’ve run race cars for Audi UK at Le Mans, Hondas for BTCC. (Different challenges?) They’re one and the same thing, actually. Motor racing is about an optimised vehicle, and that’s what these things (EVs) are, really.
C-TH: At Arena, Greg runs a small research and development team, and lot of the design work Greg has done on the Elektrobay has come from the motor-racing industry. I sold the product to Westminster Council originally, Greg came up with the design and is now very much my business partner.
FA: Are there any patented parts in the Elektrobay, or specific innovations?
GS: One of the things we have is registered design over the unit. It could be perceived as being relatively low-tech, an electrical socket on a post, but aesthetically we’ve worked to make it look good.
The internals themselves, everything has been designed specifically for the job. We don’t use an embedded PC, we design all our own electronic hardware, software and firmware. And they’re extremely strong. We use a lot of high-grade aluminium components, they have a ten-year life at least.
FA: How much maintenance does an Elektrobay need? Who is responsible for checking and servicing?
GS: Little to none. As part and parcel of supplying the infrastructure we offer a maintenance service where we check all of the specific components required by law, twice a year.
They use the same 13-amp socket as a domestic outlet, but if someone wishes to charge at home, we recommend they get a dedicated socket put in by a qualified electrician specifically for the purpose of vehicle charging.
FA: Besides local authorities, do you supply units to private companies or fleets?
GS: Yes, we have supplied them to people like EDF Energy, to Mercedes, to BT. The majority of users at the moment are probably private owners, G-Wiz owners in London are the most prolific.
FA: Are you working with energy companies on the supply of sustainable-source electricity?
GS: It’s up to the integrator where they get their power sourced from. For example, all the sites we’ve done with Camden Council, all of those are supplied by renewable energy.
FA: What do you see as the remaining major barriers to mainstream EV use?
GS: The availability of vehicles, but that will change. And the obvious cost barrier.
FA: How about the limitations with the current infrastructure?
C-TH: At the moment there is limited funding available. But in the longer term, that’s going to have to change, we are going to have hundreds of charging stations, thousands, tens of thousands…
I also think we are going to have on-street charging stations combined with parking meters, so it’s a parking meter that also administers electricity. We do have the technology already in the Elektrobay. Instead of using coins, the transaction will be via wireless access tags, pay-as-you-go, mobile phone texting.
FA: Who are you working with apart from Mercedes-Benz and Smart?
CT-H: We have a MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) with the Renault-Nissan Alliance.
FA: Aren’t they also working with Better Place on battery-swapping systems?
CT-H: I think battery-swapping in the short to medium term is not the way forward. It’s not easy to swap a battery out, and are Better Place talking about a one-chassis, one-model scenario? How can they stock every battery, for every car? And the infrastructure to build these swap stations will be incredibly expensive.
Batteries are very expensive, upwards of GBP6000 each; they’ve got a limited life-cycle and have to be charged and looked after carefully. If you go and swap a battery how do you know that battery hasn’t been damaged, or over-charged or abused?
My personal view is that we have vehicles coming into the marketplace that are quite capable of doing 100 miles; it won’t be long before the industry has those batteries capable of a 200-mile range, more than adequate for most people’s daily journeys. In the morning, you wake up with a car capable of nearly 200 miles from an overnight charge, but you can also go to work and plug in, you can go to the shopping mall and plug in, and those top-up charges, much the same as we do with a mobile phone, will give you another 20 miles each time. Why swap a battery?
FA: What’s the next big technical development, and your next aim?
CT-H: Infrastructure-wise, it’s going to be the remote billing, and possibly charging at 32 amps, which will effectively halve your charging time. That’s probably about 12 months away, the EU is still trying to decide on a common standard for electric vehicle plugs and charging stations.
The next big ambition is to crack the USA, and continue with our infrastructure going into Europe. End of next year I think we’re on target to supply in excess of 1000 Elektrobays. We can scale up production and make thousands annually.
FA: And you intend to be the largest supplier?
CT-H: Yes, we do. There’s no-one else with a product ready to put in the marketplace at the moment.
