News

Electric Fuel & German Govt. Undertake EV Development Program

September 25, 2000 by Jeff Shepard

Electric Fuel Corporation (Iselin, NJ) announced that the German government has issued a contract to undertake a cooperative all-electric hybrid vehicle development and demonstration program in Germany. A consortium comprised of Electric Fuel's Electrical Vehicle Division, and several major German industrial firms and academic institutions will implement the program, announced in January 2000. The four-year program will develop and demonstrate a hybrid vehicle design based on DaimlerChrysler (Stuttgart, Germany) cargo vans. The vans will be powered by Electric Fuel's refuelable zinc-air batteries as the main energy storage, together with high-power booster batteries provided by Varta (Hanover, Germany), and ultracapacitors under development by Dornier GmbH (a division of Daimler-Chrysler Aerospace) and by EPOC AG (formerly Siemens Matsushita Components). The organizers of the project, including the German Federal Science Ministry, which will co-fund the program along with the consortium members, hope it will eventually lead to high-performance, clean electric transportation. According to Yoel Gilon, Electric Fuel's Director of EV Technologies, "It is gratifying to be part of the technical direction taken by the consortium to create an electric hybrid that meets all of the requirements of the modern fleet vehicle." Mr. Gilon added, "This is the same direction we have taken in the United States with our all-electric battery-battery hybrid transit bus project."