Smart Car goes electric, uses Zebra battery
Sunday, July 16th, 2006
The Green Car Congress reports that DaimlerChrysler will release a Smart fortwo electric vehicle this November as part of a commercial trial in the U.K. that will be limited to corporate customers. The car will only be available for lease, unfortunately, and only 200 vehicles will be delivered for the trial.
The car will be powered by a Zebra sodium nickel chloride battery, the same energy-storage system being used in the Halton Hills Hydro load-shifting demonstration that I posted about last week. The battery will have a 30 kilowatt output and the car will be able to reach a top speed of 120 kilometres per hour. The range on full charge is 116 kilometres and the battery can charge from 20 per cent to 80 per cent in four hours. Full recharge takes eight hours.
Seems interest is growing for the Zebra battery. If volume production is the only thing keeping this technology from being economical, perhaps it is a good idea to open up a North American manufacturing facility with 100,000-unit-a-year capacity, as the folks at Halton Hills Hydro would like to do.


Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.