In September 2009 Mayor of Mount Alexander Shire in central Victoria, Philip Schier, took delivery of an Electron.

The car was purchased as part of the Shire’s Greenhouse Action Plan, which seeks to reduce Shire-wide carbon emissions by 30% of 2000 levels by 2010.

Mayor Philip Schier with his Electron

Electron and Tesla Roadster - electric heaven?

The founder of internet service provider Internode, Simon Hackett, bought an Electron in mid-2009 and it has been his “daily drive” ever since. He also owns the only Tesla Roadster in Australia, but this has not yet been approved for road use.

Read about the Electron on Simon’s blog.

Earth Garden’s cute little yellow electric car — Sunny — was just the first of many such cars produced in 2008 by world-beating Central Victorian company, Blade Electric Vehicles.

by Alan Gray
Trentham, Victoria

In a stunning boost for the Australian electric car maker, Blade Electric Vehicles, Hyundai New Zealand have announced plans to sell 200 of BEV’s ‘Blade Runner Mark II’ electric cars in NZ. The cars will be the Mark II version of the Earth Garden electric Getz featured in the March 2008 issue of EG. Hyundai New Zealand become the first automotive manufacturer to offer new electric cars for sale in New Zealand.

“This move will create a lot of interest within political parties and government agencies, as the NZ Government’s Transport Strategy 2008 states that New Zealand should become one of the first countries in the world to widely use electric vehicles. Officials from the Ministry for the Environment, Ministry for Economic Development and the Ministry of Transport have all been very supportive of Hyundai’s move,” commented Philip Eustace, Executive Director of Hyundai Motors New Zealand.

“They see this as a way to get the electric car strategy underway. As a country we are adopters of technology which makes us reliant on other countries and we are a long way off having mass production electric cars available here.”

The electric Getz has a top speed of 110+ kmh with a range of 100 km on a single charge with a rapid charge extending the daily range to approximately 200 km. The cars will be a fully electric, plug-in version of the petrol Getz. The Getz is a retro-fit electric car, meaning that the batteries and electric motor are fitted to the car after the petrol engine is taken out.

“This is a huge leap forward for BEV, and if they can do it across the Tasman, surely we can do it here,” Ross Blade, Managing Director of BEV told Earth Garden. When Earth Garden contacted Ross Blade for this story, he had 12 Hyundai Getzs in his central Victorian workshop in various stages of conversion from petrol to electric.

“The best way to support this industry is simply to buy one of these cars. There are large companies, government departments and many local councils that could slash their emissions by supporting an eco-friendly car industry,” he said.

Several Victorian councils have now bought Blade Runners. Melton, Nillumbik and Moorabool shires have bought one each and Maribyrnong council in the inner west of Melbourne have bought three. The City of Melbourne came back and bought a second Blade Runner after being very impressed with the performance of their first one. And the Victorian Government’s Department of Human Services has now taken delivery of a converted Toyota Yaris, a heavy car not as well suited to conversion as the Getz.

Emission free
If an Electron is recharged from 100% GreenPower it becomes an emission-free car. We have now driven more than 6000 km without a hitch. The car is a delight to drive, it handles beautifully, and has all the power and acceleration of a petrol car. In fact, we’re yet to discover a single drawback. We plug it in every evening in the carport, it’s fully recharged next morning, and we never have to visit petrol stations any more.

World comparison
The world’s most advanced electric car is the Tesla sports car, a US$100,000 sports car from California that can go from 0-100 kmh in four seconds. If you like sports cars this is the one, yet we’ve been told that the driver’s seat is not adjustable!

It appears from our research that the Blade Runner is probably the world’s most advanced production electric passenger car: its range (100 km), acceleration, and top speed (120 kmh) are above the specifications of any other production passenger car we can find.

Electric sports car
The Mazda MX-5 is a well-known sports car and BEV have just finished converting one for NSW resident, Mr Walter Koeller. Walter is an electrical engineer who loves to tinker. And he’s always liked the idea of an electric car. So when he saw the Electron on a TV news report in March 2008, he couldn’t resist.

“I always imagined I’d convert one myself, but when I saw that Ross Blade’s cars have a 40 kw AC motor combined with a lithium-ion battery pack I thought: ‘That’s exactly what I want’,” Walter said recently.

Now he’s the proud owner of a British Racing Green, fully-electric, Mazda MX-5 convertible sports car. After discussing his plans with Ross Blade, Walter hunted around for the perfect secondhand MX-5 to convert. He found a 1999 model which had an 1800 cc petrol motor, so the car could comfortably carry the weight of the large, 67-cell battery pack.

Walter finds that his MX-5 keeps up with any petrol cars on the road and easily goes 110 kmh on the freeway.

“It’s no slug. After tweaking it a little myself I found that it goes extremely well up our steep hill. You wouldn’t know it’s electric. It’s the perfect sports car. I love going out in it,” he says.

“I don’t like the fact that I was forced to buy petrol to get around. Getting an electric car allows me to say, ‘No, I don’t want to buy your product,’ when I sail past a petrol station.”

Walter clearly loves electric toys: his family also have an electric bike, a Toyota Prius and they generate a good slab of their own electricity from a grid-connected 1 kw (8 X 125 watt) solar power system and 1 kw Bergey wind turbine on their hilltop property in New South Wales.

• For more information about the Electron visit the Blade Electric Vehicles website at: www.bev.com.au.

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’.

Minister Nick Smith was an early adopter of the Blade Electron. According to a speech in NZ Parliament introducing legislation to remove the road user charge for electric vehicles, he said “The last point I want to make about electric cars is that they are beautifully quiet. I have one of the Hyundai Getz electric cars, which was manufactured in Australia by Blade Electric Vehicles.”

Read more news here

March, 2008

Earth Garden editor, Alan Gray, describes the first drive of his stunning new electric company car that will cut Greenhouse gases by 6.8 tonnes per year.

by Alan Gray
Trentham, Victoria.

It’s the fifth of February 2008, and I’ve just arrived at the Blade Electric Vehicles workshop in central Victoria to take delivery of my new, fully-electric company car. As I watch the hum of activity from machinists, electricians, and owner Ross Blade, my thoughts drift to Christmas 1965 — more of that later.

Ross Blade takes 2002-2010 Hyundai Getz four door hatchbacks and rips the guts out of them. First he removes the engine, then he removes the spare wheel. Once he’s finished this he starts putting it all back together again, but better. What he puts back in transforms this modest little passenger car into the most technically and ecologically advanced car in Australia.

Urban run-about
The zero-emission Getz — the Electron — is the first of many to emerge from Ross’s conversion process. What makes it special is its ease of use and performance. This is an urban run-about. The car has a top speed of over 100 kmh, a range of 100 km between recharges, and it can cost less than a dollar to recharge, depending on your household’s power costs.

It takes about eight hours for a full recharge and it costs around $34,000 — on top of the car cost — for the conversion. So I’m about to drive the most expensive little four door hatchback in the country, and I’m ecstatic. Paying $48,000 for a $14,000 car is not something most people would do with any great enthusiasm. However, there are many people who understand the value of supporting an emerging eco-solution, and who can afford to add this $34,000 conversion cost to their existing mortgages.

This is exactly what we did. Our bank called it a ‘supplementary home loan’ and we are happy to pay extra to help put a tiny cork in the massive oil flow that Australians encourage every year. This is part of the solution to the world’s transport emission problems, along with public transport, CNG, recycled oils for biofuel, compressed air, bicycles, and walking!

What makes the Electron particularly appealing to me is that it’s a here-and-now, local solution presented by an ethical small business.

The first drive
I try to keep out of the way as Ross charges, adjusts, and fiddles with various car components. Then the moment arrives. We stand by the roadside as Ross performs the very first test drive. We’re left slack-jawed and wide-eyed as the car just whizzes off with all the acceleration of a ‘normal’ car. I’m amazed. The only thing I hear is the whizzing sound of the controller fans spinning as Ross disappears up the road at a great rate of knots. It’s phenomenal to watch and it feels like watching a piece of motoring history.
Ross returns looking as excited as we all feel, and soon we’re ripping around the back roads of Harcourt trying to find the steepest hills in the district. The Big Hill looms and Ross shakes his head with delight as we belt up at 60 kmh. Ross then gallops along at 92 kmh until we return to the workshop for my turn. It’s clear already: this car drives just as well as, if not better than, its petrol equivalent.

“Now, concentrate Gray,” I tell myself as I try to remember to put on my seat belt, indicate, and do all those basic things that I’m too excited to care about. I glide away from the workshop, my mouth dry with elation, and my pulse racing. I’m not the sort of bloke who’s ever been particularly excited about any car but this is a supremely exciting driving experience. I keep waiting to be disappointed by some aspect of the whole experience but nothing emerges: it’s just plain fabulous.

I think of The Jetsons in their flying cars, and other sci-fi movies of virtually silent vehicles. Thanks to the whirring controller fans, the car’s not completely silent, which my wife, Judith, thinks is a good thing: she’s worried about people getting run over as they step off a footpath without looking. A loud hailer strapped to the roof racks playing doof-doof noises could fix that problem.

I return to the workshop feeling like a Roman conqueror — but trying to keep a lid on it of course. Is it really that momentous? Veni, vidi . . . I came, I saw, I drove. Maybe it’s not that momentous but it sure feels like it.

No doubt one day soon I’ll get over the excitement but on that first day when the car came home, I barely slept. I drove it up to the front door of the office and plugged it in to recharge. The onboard charger turns itself off when the batteries are full, so it’s super simple to recharge the car. But about 2 am I thought: “Maybe I might just go and have a little look at the car and check that it’s . . . charging okay.” Another thought would shoot back: “Don’t be a whacker — go to sleep!” So I tossed and turned half the night and I’ll be relieved when the novelty wears off. In fact, I’ll be utterly delighted when zero emission cars outnumber petrol and diesel cars on all our roads.

Recharged on solar power
Some people might wonder if there’s any advantage –Greenhouse-wise — to an electric car if the electricity comes from dirty, coal-fired power stations. After all, 90 per cent of Australia’s electricity comes from coal. Various Australian and overseas studies have shown however, that if you centralise the emissions by recharging a network of electric cars from coal, the net result is still massive decreases in air pollution.

In fact, a phenomenon known as ‘thermal lag’ means that if electric cars are recharged at night, they have little impact on fossil fuel consumption. This is because giant coal-fired power stations must run at around 80 per cent capacity all through the night — even though there’s little demand — to be able to cope with the peak morning power needs. They can’t simply be turned down to a simmer. It’s a bit like turning around the Queen Mary: it’s a slow process. So some bright spark worked out that three million cars could be recharged overnight on the Californian electricity grid without adding any fossil fuels to the system.

Now, to me, that all seems like an awfully short-term way to approach vehicle transport and Greenhouse solutions. At the top of my list of daydreams is the idea that I could recharge our electric car from the solar panels on the office roof, backed up by off-peak, 100 per cent solar GreenPower from the mains grid.

For readers unfamiliar with GreenPower, visit the website www.greenpower.com.au. The latest figures show that more than 950,000 customers throughout Australia — households and businesses — pay extra for their electricity to ensure that it is all generated by renewable energy. Australians are embracing GreenPower in droves. In fact, more than 55,000 new customers signed up for GreenPower in just three months one year. And yes, GreenPower is fully audited each year and according to Choice magazine, the electricity companies really do stick to their requirements to generate new renewable energy to replace the amount of electricity you use each year.

The 100 per cent GreenPower that the Earth Garden office buys to supplement the solar power generated from our roof panels means that our new electric company car is being recharged by solar power. You could say that it’s a solar-powered car.

Under the bonnet
It was weird to look under the bonnet of the Blade Runner and recognise not a single component except the brake fluid reservoir. The most obvious component is the big box with twin fans. This is the controller and it inverts the DC (battery) power to AC (alternating current) to run the high-tech AC motor. An AC motor runs cooler, more smoothly, and with greater power than a DC motor. Underneath the controller, virtually hidden from view, is the 40 kw electric motor, which is three phase to give the smoothest possible motoring. The car retains a standard 12 volt automotive battery to run the car’s accessories and safety systems.

The powerful onboard charger is mounted under the front passenger seat and the fans whirr reassuringly when the battery bank is being charged. Moving back, the petrol cap hides a fancy little electric socket. The car is recharged with a standard 10 amp, household extension cord, although Ross supplies a heavy duty version with each car.

The batteries are mounted under the rear seat where the spare tyre once sat. Initially I found it a little disconcerting that there’s no spare tyre — probably because I’ve spent many a night around the campfire in the Great Sandy Desert using the old Tyre Pliers kit to pull apart punctured tyres and repair them. But I’m assured that for urban run-abouts most people either ring their State motoring association or make a temporary repair with those cans that spray gunk into the flat tyre as they reinflate them. Apparently modern radial tyres are becoming so reliable that some of BMW’s latest models have no provision whatsoever for a spare tyre.

The Earth Garden electric car is fitted with Michelin silicon tyres filled with nitrogen. This cost another $325 after trade-in of the original tyres. Silicon tyres have much better rolling ability than standard rubber tyres, and filling them with nitrogen means they stay inflated much longer because the nitrogen molecules are much larger than normal air molecules.

Back to the batteries. On board is a bank of 55, 3.3 volt lithium ion batteries. These are far more environmentally friendly, and safer, than lead-acid batteries and, according to a 2005 British study, have an extremely high rate of recovery of all the metals and other components when recycled. The battery bank sits snugly in the space formerly occupied by the petrol tank and spare wheel, and the system voltage is 182 volts, peaking at 220 volts during recharge.

Why Getz?
All parts and labour on the Electron come with a five year warranty. Ross has written confirmation from Hyundai that, for new cars, they will maintain their standard five year warranty on any bits of the car not affected by his alarming form of butchering and reassembly. Ross says that the shape of the Getz suits his conversion process, and parts are readily available all over Australia.

A recent online study found that the Getz is an extremely recyclable car. Another advantage, that I hadn’t even considered until I took delivery, is the ease of ‘rolling up’ the back seats to form a virtual station wagon. I was amazed at the amount of space inside this little car once the back seats are up. Apparently many people maintain a Getz like this for work: nurses, trades people, sales reps with samples to cart around, vets, and so on. Of course, it’s also relatively cheap (until Ross gets hold of it!). My initial drives have convinced me that this is a seriously versatile little car.

Doing the sums
I hope that people who CAN afford to add $34,000 to their home loans will do so. There are also many people in Australia about to inherit money. If people who can afford such a car take the plunge it will eventually drive down the unit cost of such conversions and make the car affordable to a wider number of people. Of course, many company and government fleets could afford to go electric today.

As large companies become more and more concerned with showing how Green they are, a fleet of Electrons would be a wonderful way to put your money where your planet is. After all, if a small company like Earth Garden can do it, surely any number of large companies can do it.

Our car recharging costs are looking pretty good. We pay extra for 100 per cent GreenPower in our office and our off-peak electricity cost is 6.31 cents per kilowatthour, plus GST. This means that the 14 kw required for a full charge will cost around 97 cents — provided we only recharge at off peak rates, which are available to the EG office between 11pm and 7 am, seven days a week. Of course, on sunny days when our solar panels are producing more electricity than we can consume in the office, we can also recharge the car from our excess solar power.
My eldest sone, Tane, has just done the sums on the little Hyundai he and his girlfriend drive around Hobart. He worked out that last year they spent $3500 on petrol, oil, and maintenance. Tane is the world’s best budgeter so he knows exactly how much they spent, rather than estimating. The cost of running the Electron at 20,000 km a year should be around $194 — provided we recharge the car with off peak GreenPower.

Reduced Greenhouse gases
According to the Australian Greenhouse Office our current car — a four cylinder Toyota — generates about 0.32 kg/km of greenhouse gases (with a driver only). So over an average year’s driving the electric car we will save 6,816 kg (6.8 tonnes) of Greenhouse gases.

Tipping point
I like the idea of ‘tipping points’. I’ve seen it happen in various environmental campaigns over the past 30 years or more. Maybe the screamingly obvious just finally becomes . . . screamingly obvious. There are plenty of exceptions of course — we’re all still waiting for State governments in Victoria, Tasmania, and New South Wales to stop ripping up our publicly owned forests to flog them off as woodchips.

But look at how awareness of climate change has spread through world populations like wild fire since Al Gore made his Big Scary Movie. And look at how grid-connected solar power systems on suburban roofs have ballooned by 500 per cent since May 2007.

I cherish the hope that electric cars might take off the same way. My flash of memory on arriving in Ross’s workshop was back to 1965. I was four. I got a shiny blue pedal car for Christmas that year and I haven’t thought about that car since the 1960s. Now I’m 46, and the feeling of excitement is exactly the same.