Suzuki recently launched its new battery powered Every van. The vehicle is an electric version of Suzuki’s existing Carry Van and it was designed to give competition to Mitsubishi’s Minicab i-MiEV. Vans such as the Carry are widely used in countries like Japan for business and agricultural purposes. Size, fuel efficiency and maneuverabilty are a few reasons for their popularity. Suzuki hasn’t started to fully mass produce these yet as for now only 13 trial versions of the van have been dispatched to Suzuki dealerships around Japan. The aim is to gather driving data and to test the market before launching it on a full scale.
Coming to the specifications of the van, it comes with high-capacity compact lithium ion batteries which can do about 100 kilometers on one full charge. The batteries take 5 hours to be fully charged using a 200V outlet, the cargo space has a capacity of 250 kilograms and the overall weight of the van has been increased by 200 kilograms over the IC engine model. The data that Suzuki gathers from the testing is probably going to be useful to them when they open their Next Generation Environmental Vehicle technology development center in August 2016. Hopefully, they will start mass producing this vehicle a lot before that in order to be competitive with rivals like Mitsubishi and Nissan.
The i-MiEV minicab already went on sale earlier this year and Nissan will start testing the electric version of their NV200 by the end of July, so it sure is going to be a tight race for these Japanese juggernauts. Such a competition can only be good for the world and is relevant for markets around the world. In fact, trucks are responsible for 50 percent of the soot and a quarter of the smog causing pollution on American highways. Delivery vehicles like trucks and vans are actually responsible for 6 percent of the U.S’s total global warming pollution.
Surely these vans are not going to minimize these numbers dramatically any time soon, nor are they going to replace trucks on American highways. But it sure does seem to be the start of something pointed in that direction. Will there be large trucks run by electric batteries five years from now? It’s something hard to even imagine today, but environmentalist around the world will be rooting for companies like Mitsubishi and Suzuki to make such a dream come true.
Via: Engadget
