Earth Garden’s editor updates readers on the performance of his electric company car, a converted Hyundai Getz, after two years of daily driving.

by Alan Gray
Trentham, Victoria

I can barely believe that our electric car has now done more than 20,000 km – unserviced. In fact for 20,000 km it has never been off the road for a day, and has never given us any problems. It is a delight to drive and is easily the most reliable car we’ve ever owned.

Sure – it’s $48,000 price tag puts it out of the reach of many motorists, but the savings in running costs are truly remarkable. For the past 18 months we’ve charged the car from the solar panels on our roof, so we have no ‘fuel bill’. And apart from the fuel and service savings compared to an equivalent petrol car (around $2500 per year), we have also found that we’ve saved over $3000 per year by not driving our diesel Landcruiser. That’s because the drivers in the family would rather wait and reschedule their trips to drive the electric car – Sunny – rather than have the convenience of hopping in the fossil-fuel car.

Sunny is amazing. I have to fight Judith for a drive – she loves it more than I do. I estimate that it will pay for itself in less than five years – even without petrol prices rising.

Something else that’s surprised us is just how much we can cart around in a four door hatchback. We fitted roof racks to Sunny when we bought her, assuming that with all our kids playing music gigs about town, we’d need to be strapping guitars, banjos and snare drums to the roof rack. In fact, we often get three guitars, an amp, guitar rack, and a Cajun drum in the back. We’ve only used the roof racks once, and that was to bring home a large chest of drawers. And on days when we have four adults in the car, with a boot full of shopping and the aircon blasting away, we can still comfortably sit on 80 kmh, or 110 kmh if we needed to. There is no noticeable loss of acceleration or power when using the aircon or any other accessories.

So what are the drawbacks of owning and driving Australia’s first production electric car?

Er . . . we’ll let you know when we think of one.

We drive around 50-60 solar-powered kilometres per day and the car handles this with ease. It has a range of around 100 km between full charges, but an optional rapid charger is now available that will recharge the car in just one hour. That creates a daily range of 200 km — if needed, although the vast majority of the world’s daily car journeys are 75 km or less.

Each night we plug the car into a standard power point in our car port, and next morning it’s fully charged and ready for another day of silent motoring. The batteries need around 6-7 kwh of electricity for a half charge, and our home power system usually generates more than enough power to run our house and recharge the car.
Sunny has been a delightful success story for us – we can’t imagine ever parting with her!

Blade Electric Vehicles
Meanwhile, the Central Victorian electric car company that builds our car, Blade Electric Vehicles, has just achieved a major milestone that places it at the forefront of global development in electric passenger cars. Its four door hatchback ‘Electron’ has just passed being crash tested by a national crash testing authority (Autoliv Australia Test Centre).

“This is Australia’s first electric vehicle to be successfully crash tested and, according to Autoliv’s engineers, the Electron’s results were excellent,” said Ross Blade, founder of Blade Electric Vehicles (BEV). The detailed charts supplied by Autoliv show that the Electron easily passed all crash testing criteria by large margins. BEV is the first EV manufacturer to comply with VicRoads’ stringent new rules for evidence of safety in EVs. Victoria has the highest standards of evidence for EV safety in Australia.

The Electron currently sells for $48,000 inc GST; BEV have a three year buyback scheme in place; the four-seater car goes 110 km/h+ with all the acceleration of its petrol equivalent.

• If you’d like to watch a recent light-hearted look at Sunny being ‘road-tested’ by ABC TV at the Grays’ home, click here: ‘Kimberley electric car part of a climate change solution’.