Unveiled at the Seoul Motor Show, Ssangyong's KEV2 is an all-electric concept car based on the company's latest diesel engine Korando SUV. For the KEV2, the conventional drivetrain has been replaced by a 120 kW electric motor and 35kWh lithium-ion battery pack, which Ssangyong says will take the car to a top speed of 93 mph (150 km/h) and deliver a maximum range of just over 110 miles (180 km).
The KEV2 concept retains the overall shape of the Korando, but the front grille is gone and the standard headlights replaced by a sharper LED design. Side vents and alloy wheels have been also been added and inside there's a tablet PC mounted in the center console (though no official pics of the interior have yet been released).
Ssangyong quotes a charging time of around eight to ten hours via a conventional electricity supply with a higher-voltage rapid charge option reducing this to "as little as 30 minutes."
The Korean automaker recently emerged from court-protected bankruptcy (after India's Mahindra & Mahindra took a majority stake in the company) and hopes that the KEV2will signal that its "plans for an electric vehicle range are back on track."
It\'s not true - as above, the demand for fuel is fairly inelastic; people are apparently prepared to keep paying for it no matter how bad the objective cost-benefit begins to look. Though - everything is a matter of degree. If the supply of hydrocarbons disappeared overnight then we would be looking at social catastrophe. However, since it\'s not that binary, we do have the opportunity to migrate to something more practical and suited to the world of peak oil in the mean time.
There are many reasons for me to go electric and, in fact, environmental concerns are one of those reasons. Pollution related to the combustion of hydrocarbon based fuels has numerous negative impacts - no need to expand on that. Moving the problem from hundreds of millions of individual internal combustion engines to the centralized electricity generation facilities is also a very practical first step in addressing that problem.
You know - there isn\'t going to be a red flag day where suddenly all cars are electric and all electric power generation is based on clean and sustainable sources of energy. Any new technology is expensive at first; electric car technology has far greater potential for commoditization and cost reduction than internal combustion engines that have had over a century of commoditization - and electrics are already near as dammit cost competitive. It\'s one foot in front of the other guys. I do wonder about the psychology of people who continually dismiss the good because it isn\'t perfect.