Electric truck hauls amps
Slowly, the arguments against owning an alternative-fuel vehicle are being made invalid. There's an electric car for speed junkies. There's even a hybrid for hauling more than two people. The Prius not orange enough for ya? You're covered too.
But until now, if you wanted to haul cargo, your choices were limited, if not nonexistent. Phoenix Motorcars hopes to fill that need soon with its uncreatively-named Sport Utility Truck. The midsize pickup will use not one drop of gasoline while hauling your oversized sheets of plywood or mounds of mulch. The four-door cab will even let you take five of your closest home-improvement-able friends to the megastore, while the 480-lb-ft of torque takes the vehicle to 60 mph in a claimed 10 seconds and on up to 95 mph.
Phoenix says the SUT's battery pack will recharge 95% in 10 minutes with the off board charger and in six hours with the on board charger. The company says its NanoSafe battery packs will get 100 miles on a charge, and are guaranteed for 12 years. It just received a $750,000 order for 10 of the 35KWh packs from Altair Nanotechnologies. That order will help the company meet its goal of selling 500 of the California-built pickups in late 2007 in that state, and 6,000 nationwide by 2008.
Autoblog Green reported on the company from SEMA and has all the technical details on their site.
More photos after the jump.
[Sources: TechEBlog and The Auto Channel]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
jrhmobile 10:20AM (1/01/2007)
75 grand for the battery pack!!? Crimony -- if I wanted a $100,000 pickup, I could think of a lot of different ways to go that would be more useful, or more fun, than this.
This may have been a question that somebody asked, but I'll bet they wilol ignore the answer. When your utility rates shoot up/property taxes explode, check the fleet of your local utility/municipality/monopoly. I'll bet you find a bunch of these lead(-acid) balloons there ...
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ts 10:27AM (1/01/2007)
ford had fully electric hybrid rangers in 2001. i drove one myself in LA. It got around quite well. You could lease them from different municipalities that offered them. Anaheim even had docking stations at malls for you to recharge.
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R 10:32AM (1/01/2007)
Why does it look like a Ssangyong Actyon?
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Y. 12:18PM (1/01/2007)
Why does it look like a Ssangyong Actyon?
Gee, here's a wild guess: because it is a Ssangyong Actyon?
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Benson Leung 12:43PM (1/01/2007)
ts : If something is "fully-electric" it is not a "hybrid." Hybrid implies that it uses gasoline or some other kind of combustible fuel in combination with an electric drivetrain.
Ford's Ranger EV was a full blown electric vehicle, much like the GM EV-1.
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ts 1:21PM (1/01/2007)
sorry, i didn't mean to insert 'hybrid' there.
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George Krpan 1:37PM (1/01/2007)
jrhmobile,
I talked to a rep from Phoenix at the Alt Car Expo. The price of the SUT is $45,000. Don't be a dolt. Obviously the $750k went towards more than the 10 battery packs.
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Y. 1:45PM (1/01/2007)
'Why does it look like a Ssangyong Actyon?'
Wild guess: because it essentially is a Ssangyong Actyon?
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D 2:59PM (1/01/2007)
#6...no, the $750K IS for 10 packs. They rely on an EV credit to sell them at that price.
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JETSOLVER 4:58PM (1/01/2007)
For a little perspective on Electric trucks
http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&sspagename=ADME%3AB%3ASS%3AUS%3A1&viewitem=&item=200057780258
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Ian 8:19PM (1/01/2007)
The second ugliest current car in the world. Ssangyong also makes the ugliest.
That's a fairly uncommon body style in Korea. It's usually the overgrown Pontiac/Daewoo Lemans style. But anyhow, looks like all they're doing is converting it to electric.
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