Interviewee: Jacques de Selliers - President of the European Association for Battery Electric Vehicles

The future of electric cars is huge. Why? Because 80% of the transportation is done for a very short distance like typically less than 50km and with one person in a car. So this is exactly what electric cars can do. They can carry people for short distances and they have an excellent energy yield. They are zero pollution in the cities so you get clean cities. They have virtually zero noise, so you have noiseless cities. And they allow to reduce strongly the oil dependency if the electricity is produced from other sources than oil, of course.

Yes. Well, that’s a Ferrari like car, the Tesla car is really a car that no one can afford except for very rich people. But there are already some cheap cars nowadays and the price is going to go down a lot when the battery technology will improve. And battery technology is improving fast because next year several car makers are going to bring some cars with lithium ion batteries, which are much more efficient than lead batteries used up to now, and have a much longer charging potential and are much lighter than lead batteries.

There have been lots of prototypes that have always been very short-lived. For the moment, there’s only one electric car that’s currently available commercially and it’s the engine Reva car, which is made in India since 2001, sold in Britain, in London actually, since 2003 under the name Gee Whiz, and now has arrived in Belgium and many other European countries. There’s the Tesla that’s announced but not yet deliverable. There’s the Think in Norway that is soon going to be deliverable in Nordic countries, and there are many prototypes coming out for the coming years in one year, two year’s time. Really the future of electric cars is for today and tomorrow.