THE first locally manufactured electric car to ply the roads in Singapore could be a taxi if Singapore and German researchers from the TUM-Create research group get their own way. Meanwhile, at the launch of Renault’s new test of electric vehicles with utility Singapore Power, Mr Andre Roy, the managing director of Wearnes Automotive, said Renault-Nissan aims to sell 1.5 million electric vehicles worldwide by 2016. The Renault Fluence ZE and Renault Kangoo ZE can travel up to 185km on a full battery.

By Grace Chua in Straits Times (2 March 2012):

THE first locally manufactured electric car to ply the roads in Singapore could be a taxi.

Singapore and German researchers from the TUM-Create research group, tasked with studying the use of electric vehicles and infrastructure in the tropics, have settled on designing a taxi.

‘Electric cars are expensive to buy but cheap to run,’ said Technical University of Munich’s (TUM’s) Professor Markus Lienkamp, the scientific director for the electric-vehicle project.

Because taxis get a lot of mileage and run all day, it makes more business sense to have electric cabs rather than private cars, he explained.

TUM and Nanyang Technological University are joint partners in the TUM-Create Centre for Electromobility, set up in Singapore in late 2010 as part of the National Research Foundation’s Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (Create) programme.

The centre’s studies of local taxi data and interviews with cabbies revealed that taxis here trundle along at an average speed of 33 kmh and travel 200km a shift, two shifts a day. That adds up to more than a million kilometres over a taxi’s lifespan of, say, eight years.

‘What we are doing here could be a blueprint for other tropical megacities as well,’ Prof Lienkamp added.

The researchers aim to have a demonstration model ready by 2014 and hope companies will then pick up the technology and invest in it. Now, they are deciding on the specific package of technologies that will go into the electric taxi.

For example, they must figure out how to boost the range of the car to the 400km a day that taxis typically travel here. Some options include using hydrogen fuel cells, faster battery charging and changing batteries.

The typical range of electric cars is much smaller – for example, the Mitsubishi i-MiEVs used in an experiment here can travel about 160km on one charge.

The researchers must also cut the amount of power that an electric taxi uses for air-conditioning, whether by insulating windows, using reflective surfaces or dehumidifying the vehicle.

Prof Lienkamp did not put a price tag on the prototype or share its specifications, but said the cost of building and running it should be on a par with that of owning and operating a taxi.

But the team is not stopping there.

Professor Ulrich Stimming, chief executive of TUM-Create, said: ‘The taxi is only one part of the electromobility project. It will be a platform for testing all the new technology that we are developing.’

The five-year electromobility project, which ends in 2016, spans the spectrum from battery technology to traffic modelling. But Prof Stimming said five years may not be enough to put the electric taxi on the road.

An electric car by TUM, the two-seater Mute sub-compact, made its debut at the Frankfurt Motor Show last year.

Said Prof Lienkamp: ‘We want to diversify energy sources much better than we have done today – we need a choice.

‘And at the moment, in mobility, we have no choice – 95 per cent of the energy in cars is from oil, so we need other options, and that’s what we are looking at.’

By Christopher Tan, Senior Correspondent Straits Times  (2 March 2012):

ELECTRIC vehicles (EVs) may be good for the environment but with each one using as much energy as a small flat when being charged, will they prove to be a drain on the island’s power supply? A ‘live’ trial is being conducted to find out.

Dubbed EVs@SP, it will involve three electric Renaults and will help Singapore Power determine what changes – if any – need to be made to the country’s infrastructure to prepare for the day when vehicles such as these become commonplace here.

‘If 4 per cent of the current car population convert to electric vehicles and they are charged at the same time, I am told the amount of power required would be the same as that required to power the whole of Ang Mo Kio.’

Singapore Power group chief executive Wong Kim Yin

The aim is to make sure that power outages do not occur as a result.

At the launch of EVs@SP yesterday, Singapore Power group chief executive Wong Kim Yin said: ‘If 4 per cent of the current car population convert to electric vehicles and they are charged at the same time, I am told the amount of power required would be the same as that required to power the whole of Ang Mo Kio.’

An electric vehicle – which runs on batteries that are juiced up from electrical mains – may also be charged at more than one location (for instance, the home or workplace), Mr Wong added. This makes forecasting and catering to demand more complicated.

The power distribution company’s trial is being carried out alongside a bigger electric vehicle test-bedding exercise that was launched last June.

That was when the Energy Market Authority and Land Transport Authority flagged off nine battery- powered cars: four Smart two-seaters from Daimler and five Mitsubishi iMiEVs.

All in, the test fleet in this bigger $20 million trial will have about 90 cars.

Singapore Power said that it will have access to findings of the bigger trial – which is to determine the robustness and economic viability of electric cars here – but its own trial focuses on the potential impact a large-scale charging of electric vehicles might have on power supply.

Industry sources believe electric vehicles will be ‘large scale’ in the not-too-distant future.

Mr Andre Roy, the managing director of Renault agent Wearnes Automotive, said Renault-Nissan aims to sell 1.5 million Renault and Nissan electric vehicles worldwide by 2016.

‘Renault estimates that by 2020, electric vehicles will account for 10 per cent of the total number of vehicles in the world,’ he said.

‘The automobile industry is at a historic turning point. Gone are the days where EVs can travel only 50km on a full charge.’

The Renault Fluence ZE and Renault Kangoo ZE, which were unveiled at Singapore Power’s event yesterday, can travel up to 185km on a full battery. And Mr Roy claimed the running cost of each is ‘as low as four cents per kilometre’.

While Singapore Power is apprehensive about the arrival of electric cars – a worry shared by utilities in other countries – these vehicles present a new revenue stream for power generation and distribution companies.

In fact, Singapore Power wanted to import and sell electric cars here in the 1990s to step up night-time power usage, which was then merely 60 per cent of day-time demand.

But now, with more homes with air-conditioning, the gap between day and night power demand has narrowed.

Source: www.straitstimes.com