I don’t know if any of you noticed one of the course cars at the Macau Grand Prix in November? It was a Tesla sports, with the bonnet painted green to underline the ‘green’ nature of the electric vehicle (EV).
Tesla are also now firmly in bed with Toyota, and the American branch of the world’s largest car maker has combined with Tesla to produce an EV RAV 4, which is slotted for public release in 2012.
Electric Rav’s
Toyota are producing 35 of the EV RAV’s for testing, and the plan is for the small RAV’s to be able to cover 160 km on one charge, making the EV a genuinely practical transport.
Toyota conducted the integration work in-house using the drive train and power management parts from Tesla. The RAV displayed at the LA show uses a lithium metal oxide battery, but that could change as the pace of battery technology continues to increase.
To keep the weight down, always a problem with the large battery packs, Toyota claims that the RV RAV weighs just 100 kg more than the normal RAV4 V6 and the 0-100 km/h times are similar. The EV RAV has had suspension and steering modifications, and a number of components have been moved to balance out the added bulk of the battery pack.
With the battery pack being under the floor, there is no intrusion in cargo space, as opposed to the problems reported with the Prius and the hybrid Lexus.
