Smith Electric Vehicles to Provide 10 Electric Vans to Ford of Europe

Ford is ramping up their green image, preparing for their upcoming electric van and Focus BEV. Unlike the Chevy Volt, we have not heard much about the progress of their EV program. Maybe this test program with Smith Electric Vehicles and Ford of Europe will clear one of the few remaining hurdles for this EV.

From Green Car Congress:

Smith Electric Vehicles is providing 10 Edison electric vans to Ford of Europe, which is a partner in the colognE-mobil project in Cologne (earlier post), which launched today.

The first phase of the project will examine the potential benefits of electric commercial vehicles in Cologne, then forecast how they could impact on Germany’s plans to deploy 1 million zero emission vehicles by 2020.

The Smith Edison is a pure electric version of the Ford Transit van, powered by lithium-ion batteries. Designed for urban operations, the vehicle delivers a range of up to 100 miles (160 km) on a full charge and a top speed of 50 mph (80 km/h) Smith has produced Edison in collaboration with Ford since 2007.

For this project, Smith will build seven Edison panel vans for delivery service companies, two Edison minibuses for passenger shuttle services and one Edison chassis cab for municipal use in the City of Cologne.

Ford of Europe will deliver the final vehicles to all these clients and is responsible for their technical maintenance and service during the project. Ford will also deploy a number of Ford Focus BEV electric passenger cars later in the project.

The initiative will research the impact of electric vans and cars on urban air quality, traffic safety and electricity supply infrastructure. Scientists will then scale up the results to examine the true benefits an electric future could deliver for the German city.

Ford is one of four partners in the colognE-mobil project. The others are utility company RheinEnergie AG, the City of Cologne and the University of Duisburg-Essen.

The colognE-mobil project is partly funded by the German government and coordinated by the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia.