Excitement about electric cars abounds nowadays, but consider the number of existing gasoline-powered cars — about 850 million. It would take years of new-car sales to make a dent in that number. That fact at first depressed Jiri Rasanen, a civil servant in Helsinki — but then it gave him and his friends a good idea. Why not keep the cars but replace their engines?
That idea would solve a lot of problems, starting not just with today’s installed base of cars, but with the installed base of car makers . Even though many of them are in trouble, it is probably not the best time to start a new car company, either. Yet while the market for new cars has slowed dramatically, it could be a good time to start a business replacing gasoline engines with electric ones.
The group’s initiative, led by Rasanen, is called eCars — Now! A small operation in Finland, it is less a company than a role model for companies that the team hopes will spring up worldwide.
Borrowing from the open-software movement, Räsänen and his colleagues want to make the idea and the basic designs free and encourage lots of companies all over the world to implement it locally. Some companies will make batteries or electric engines or retrofit kits; others will retrofit gasoline cars with the new engines — a great job opportunity for unemployed auto workers.
eCars- Now hopes to foster an ecosystem of car service workers and parts makers similar to the ecosystem of open-software programmers and generic computer hardware. Of course, the parallels end at some point, because batteries and engines aren’t quite the equivalent of PCs, but the ethos is much the same.
Rasanen and his team started by measuring the potential demand for electric cars in Finland.
“No one had done that before in Finland,” he said. “We decided that if we could get 500 people to show interest in a converted car, we could demonstrate that the mass conversion scheme would make sense.”
PROSPECTS
It took eCars — Now only 11 days to sign up 500 interested customers. To be sure, they merely indicated interest; they did not send money. But the company’s Web site continues to attract new prospects, with 1,000 people now registered as likely or certain to buy such a vehicle.
The site also solicited advice on which car to convert. The Toyota Corolla was the first choice — hardly surprising since it is the leading car model in Finland, with 7 percent of the market.
Just 15 months later, this month, a retrofitted Corolla demo model with an engine from Detroit-based Azure Dynamics was on display at the Electric Vehicle Symposium, a trade show in Stavanger, Norway.
What will it take to make this idea work? To some extent, it’s already working — by spreading. Local efforts may succeed or fail based on the talents of local implementers. In Italy, inventor Roberto Vezzi had a Smart-EV project along the same lines. He has now joined the eCars — Now movement, and his eSmart car will be upgraded with the open-source graphical user interface being developed for the eCorolla in Finland.
Other initiatives are springing up in Denmark, Latvia, Spain, and Turkey, says Rasanen. The group is now looking for an initial manufacturer/assembler for the retrofit kits (as opposed to the engines inside them). In the meantime, eCorolla and the eSmart will go through testing.
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