Electric Car Grants

ElectricDamo

Just thought I would mention this/ The Irish government recently offered €5,000 off buying a new EV which is great. However when I asked if builders of converted vehicles would receive this grant, it was denied citing that the fund was only applicable to new cars and that weight distribution of the converted ev might be a safety issue?

Bearing in mind that the Irish governments plan is to have 10% of the cars on the road as EVs by 2020, extending the grant scheme to converted EV's would surely help this process along no end.

The government granted exclusive rights for ev distribution to Renault and Mitsubishi and the grants are only for their cars....a converted car that im building is gonna work out at 8k and it will have a range of 120km. So if the government can extend the grant scheme we can get our cars converted for less then 4 or 5k with comparable performance to the Leaf!

I was fortunate enough to get 5k from our local enterprise office but I doubt anyone else will ever get funding.

Damien.

[MODEDIT] Link to fundraiser removed [/MODEDIT]

Macha

ElectricDamo wrote: »

The government granted exclusive rights for ev distribution to Renault and Mitsubishi and the grants are only for their cars....a converted car that im building is gonna work out at 8k and it will have a range of 120km. So if the government can extend the grant scheme we can get our cars converted for less then 4 or 5k with comparable performance to the Leaf!

This is not true Damien. The government will give the grant to any BEV that complies with their criteria, which can be found here:

http://www.seai.ie/Grants/Electric_Vehicle_Grant_Scheme/

I'm not sure if SEAI has compiled the list of eligible vehicles yet.

The agreement with Renault-Nissan (if it's the one I think you're referring to) is nothing about restricting access to the Irish EV market for Renault-Nissan and indeed I can't imagine any such proposal getting past any sort of WTO or even EU rules. The agreement effectively ensures that Renault-Nissan will make 2,000 BEVs available for the Irish market by the end of 2011, regardless of whether those cars will be sold or not.

I agree with you that the conversion of ICEs to BEVs or PHEVs is an issue that hasn't been properly considered or facilitated.

Good luck with your project.

ElectricDamo

Hi,

Thanks for your reply. I stand corrected on the exclusive statement.

I think theres a lesson to be learned from our e-voting objectives and our new electric car objective. We had all the resources to build our own voting machines and generate employment yet the contract went to the Dutch and we have all the resources to establish a national electric car conversion project and generate employment yet we seem on the face of it to be awarding grants for buying new electric cars. You are right moderator, theres not enough thought here.

Conversion of existing vehicles means employment, an increase in the uptake of ev's and finally we're also recycling.

The market life of converted ev's is short. We have maybe 5-10 years to promote a conversion scheme before the first second hand ev's begin to appear negating any advantage of buying a converted model. Then again I could be wrong, considering all parts of a converted ev are new except for the chassis/bodywork, maybe this isnt the case.

Damien.

[MODEDIT] Link to fundraiser removed [/MODEDIT]

djpbarry

ElectricDamo,

Please refrain from posting links to a fundraising initiative.

Ghost Estate

ElectricDamo wrote: »

The market life of converted ev's is short. We have maybe 5-10 years to promote a conversion scheme before the first second hand ev's begin to appear negating any advantage of buying a converted model. Then again I could be wrong, considering all parts of a converted ev are new except for the chassis/bodywork, maybe this isnt the case.

Damien.

[MODEDIT] Link to fundraiser removed [/MODEDIT]

after that people will be just building electric cars from scratch. i can see kit cars and the like getting more popular then. making electric cars seems less trouble than petrol ones

maybe things will go the other way and people will start putting petrol engines into electric cars