Lada: 1st Russian-Built Electric Vehicle
A vehicle called “El Lada” is to be the first Russian-built electric vehicle.
Renault and Nissan, which are sister companies, own 50% of Lada.
El Lada is shown below in a video that was released by AvtoVAZ, which is also a part-owner of Lada,
The car has a 60kW (80 HP) electric motor that facilitates a top speed of up to 80 mph, and it can travel up to 100 miles after each charge.
This 5-door compact hatchback electric car will undergo its first tests as a taxi in the city of Stavropol in southern Russia, which is about 100 miles above the border of Georgia. This is reminiscent of a recent EV taxi project in The Netherlands commissioned by Better Place Consortium.
Project Better Place offers a concept that enables electric vehicles to switch their batteries to fully charged ones in less than 2 minutes. This is very impressive compared to normal charge times for all other electric cars on the market today. But the key is that the vehicles don’t have to charge their own batteries — they swap them with already charged ones. But, back to Lada….
Lada recently hired former Mercedes-Benz senior designer, and former Volvo chief designer, Steve Mattin to run the Russian automaker’s design operations.
Lada has apparently jumped ahead of Yo Auto, which is owned partially by Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov. Yo Auto claimed in 2010 that it would start producing Russia’s first hybrid vehicle by the end of this year. The company recently retracted this claim and said that the car, which is called a Yo Mobile, will not be available until 2015.
Source: Autoblog
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