Electric Powered Cargo Van.........

How long until we see one?

With about every manufacture selling electric cars now, how much longer do you think it will be before the technology enables electric to power a big heavy van?

I wish I could buy one today.

This company is already doing conversions, but I'm not in any hurry to pay a quarter of a million dollars for one, or whatever they want..........they are pushing 50k rebates, and the price obviously is too high to high for them to state on website.......

http://www.zenith-motors.com

Nissan also has an NV200 (the small van) electric in testing now, which makes me hopeful a full sized production E van will be soon to come.



I've been thinking of buying a new van, but I think I'll hold out for a full sized E version.

As soon as they do i'll have to ditch a slide in and go direct drive. Maybe Tesla will get in the game,

I think we are still a dozen or more years away from it really being a player in the market. Sure, they can power a vehicle, but there are too many issues to work out for a real success.

We run electric vehicles at the plant where I work (why not, we are a power company) and although they are pretty cool, the batteries act like a cordless drill....lose reserve very quickly and end up about 1/2 power after re-charging.

The last vehicle that was purchased was just a little 4x4 gator-like vehicle to the tune of 15k dollars. It is now about 6 months old and barely holds a charge longer than 10 minutes.

They can build the systems, but the batteries are still the weak spot. They still have to figure out how to make that part work better AND lighter before I would become interested.

^Seems most E car manufacturers are now giving a 100k mile warrantee on the Li-Ion battery's in their cars.

Maybe that Gator didn't use li-ion?

Maybe

http://www.viamotors.com/vehicles/electric-van/

http://www.viamotors.com/videos/production-launch-now-is-the-time/

theres some pretty nice batteries out now

probably will be a while before larger work trucks can run on them though, there is DOT limits for how many batteries you can have on board because they can explode

the torque would be there though which is what you need with heavy loads

its good for emmisions but not really a solution because the energy still has to come from somewhere

^Haha good one!!

TimM wrote:http://www.viamotors.com/vehicles/electric-van/

I saw that site, but wasn't too impressed after watching their video.

I'll wait for a production one.