August 3, 2009, 12:15 pm , By Todd Woody
http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/electric-car-maker-sees-market-heating-up/#more-18465
Th!nk The electric vehicle maker Think is aiming to position its City brand car in a number of countries.
Nissan on Saturday night introduced the Leaf, a battery-powered four-door hatchback with a range of 100 miles and a top speed of 87 miles an hour. The Japanese automaker described the Leaf, which is scheduled to be available in the United States market in the latter half of 2010, as the first real-world electric car.
That must have rankled Th!nk, the Norwegian electric car company formerly owned by Ford. The Think City, a highway-capable two-seater with a 112-mile range, began rolling off the assembly line in December 2007.
But the company halted production late last year as in the wake of the global economic crisis.
Think subsequently obtained new financing and announced last week that it would begin selling electric drivetrains powered by lithium-ion batteries from the American manufacturer EnerDel.
Its first big customer: the Japanese postal service, which will convert some of its 22,000-vehicle fleet to electric drive.
According to Think’s chief executive, Richard Canny, the new drivetrain business is crucial to Think’s strategy in the increasingly competitive electric vehicle — or E.V. — market.
“We’re the only one out with a fully integrated E.V. drive system,” Mr. Canny said in an interview over the weekend. “It’s an opportunity to get further volume and scale on the technology we already have. And it helps us get better pricing on components and further our development of E.V. drivetrain systems.”
Mr. Canny, an Australian-born former Ford executive, was in Detroit last week to check in with a small team working on the company’s application for a Department of Energy loan guarantee that would allow it to build an American assembly plant in 2010. Eight states, including Michigan and Oregon, are vying for the factory along with a research and development center.
“We’re down to an undisclosed short list now, and we’ll probably chose a state within the next 30 to 45 days,” Mr. Canny said. “We’re faster than anyone else as we actually have a car ready to go.”
Engineers are tinkering with the City’s programming to raise its top speed to 70 or 75 mph from the current 62 so it isn’t blown away on American highways.
Think’s North American operation — backed by the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Rockport Capital Partners — plans to initially sell or lease the City to corporate fleets, and seed the car in select markets through car-sharing services like ZipCar.
The tiny City may face a tough road in the American market, though, with bigger electric vehicles hitting the streets — including the Leaf, which Nissan says it will produce in the hundreds of thousands. Development of a potential competitor to the Leaf — a futuristic four-door, five-seater called the Think Ox, has been postponed, Mr. Canny said.
“We don’t have enough capital to do the car ourselves,” he said. “The battery technology is not probably ready for a vehicle of this size.”
The company’s focus in the near future is likely to remain on Europe, where small urban runabouts are popular and government incentives have led to deals to sell the City in Austria, the Netherlands and Spain. Mr. Canny said Th!nk, whose investors include General Electric, was reviving its supply chain and expected to resume production of the City at its Aurskog, Norway, plant this year.
“The market is going to develop much faster than people expect,” he said. “The Chinese are going to be a strong competitors as well as Nissan and Mitsubishi.”
