The Land
26/03/2009

While the big auto makers promise only timelines for electric vehicles, tiny Armidale company Energetique has delivered - with some help.
Energetique’s evMe is a purely electric car built around a perkey Mazda 2 body using components sourced from around the world, all switched together with the help of home-grown software wizardry.
For $70,000, the cost Energetique is quoting for new deliveries of the evMe, owners get the pleasure of being at the vanguard of the electric vehicle revolution.
That means being at the wheel of a vehicle operating at up to 96 percent efficiency, compared to the 30pc efficiency of oil powered cars.

However, few people will pay $70,000 just to feel virtuous, and Energetique claims about 100 expressions of interest.
There’s more to the car than just efficiency. Fortunately, the evMe is a functional vehicle, one that loses some range and convenience on the original Mazda 2, but gains in other areas.
In the evMe, the Mazda’s 76 kilowatt, 137 Newton metre petrol engine has been replaced with an 89kW Swiss-made electric motor with 220 Nm of torque, hitched up to a bank of lithium-ion batteries that Energetique claims are good for 200 kilometres of useful, highway speed driving on each charge. Top speed is 130 kilometres an hour, although the car is speed limited.

Up to 180km/h is apparently possible, but hungry on the battery pack and illegal to boot. Unlike a petrol engine, the evMe’s Brusa motor has only one moving part - the spinning rotor - one gear, and no need for gear changes. motoring costs currently work out at two cents a kilometre, the company claims, with full recharge times varying from 15 hours from a standard 10 amp household plug to five hours from a specially-fitted dual 15 amp plug.

The technology allows for partial charging, so owners can top-up if the car is in regular use. Energetique has used its software expertise to wire a few extra flourishes into the evMe. For instance, the car uses regenerative breaking algorithms to slow the vehicle at traffic lights while using this energy to recharge the batteries. There are plans to use this technology to allow the car to “learn” the habits of its driver in order to better capture breaking energy as recharge.
The company is also exploring the potential of the on-board GPS system, which opens up new possibilities for automatic management - for instance, speed limiting the vehicle in school zones during certain times of the day.

Behind the wheel, the evMe feels like a normal car, albeit one unnervingly quiet at low speeds. At high speeds, road and wind noise kicks in as surrogate feedback for the hum of the engine.
The torquey electric motor delivers a different motoring experience. No more kicking down a gear on hills or in the overtaking lane: just press the accelerator and the speedometer climbs without any fuss from under the hood. With the full 220Nm of torque available from zero revs, the evMe has been electronically governed for a smooth start; otherwise this placid little car could turn into a wheel-spinning beast at the traffic lights.
But without a signature exhaust note, tweaking the circuitry to achieve just that might be the only joy left to boy racers should electric vehicles come to dominate the roads.