Can Think’s electric car revolutionize the auto industry?:
Think’s factory in the rural town of Aurskog is more reminiscent of Ikea than of Henry Ford, with its louvered wood exterior, bright open spaces, and shiny surfaces. There’s nary a drop of oil or smudge of grease on the factory floor. This is an assembly plant, and the company puts together the Think City much the way a child builds a model car.“It’s a rather low investment,” says Think managing director Ole Fretheim. “We can put up new factories quite easily.”
He points to the black steel chassis of a City standing on a nearby pallet; it’s shipped preassembled from Thailand. At one station, workers attach the car’s aluminum frame — made in Denmark — and drop in a French motor. At another station, prefabricated rust-and dent-resistant polymer-plastic body panels produced in Turkey are hung on the frame of a nearly completed car.
The modular design means that Think can change body styles — a prototype of a sporty convertible is parked in one corner of the factory — without major retooling. It also means that Think can set up shop near its primary markets so it doesn’t have to export the finished cars.
I get behind the wheel of one of 10 prototype coupes. With baby-seal-eye headlights and a rakish rear, the black test car is about 2 feet shorter than a Mini Cooper but 6 inches taller, giving it a surprisingly spacious feeling — an effect that is magnified by the glass hatch that stretches from roof to bumper and that makes parking just about idiotproof.
Start the car up, and the only sound is the annoying hum of its vacuum-pump-powered hydraulic brakes (to be replaced on the production version). Put the pedal to the metal and the City zooms off. It’s no Tesla Roadster — the current battery is speed-limited to 62 miles an hour. But it is nimble and quick and goes about 112 miles on a single charge. And it hits the red line on the fun quotient.
Which is the point, according to Willums. “The customers are the trendsetters, the early adopters, the people who had to have a Prius,” he says in lilting, Norwegian-accented English. “We’re definitely not the only car you own. The main thing we want to sell is not a car but a whole concept around the car: carefree, carbon-free mobility.”
That means no showrooms or obnoxious salespeople. Want to test-drive the City? Send a text message to find the nearest Think About car-sharing franchise. If you like what you see, you customize and order your City online.
“The idea of the future is, Never build a car before it’s paid for,” Willums says. “Once you have the image that yours is a car to be discovered, people will be happy to wait for just the right car.”
Because each vehicle is Internet-ready, you can text-message your vehicle to, say, check its battery charge. The City will e-mail you when it’s time for it to be serviced. “If someone has a great idea for a software link to the Think, we say bring it,” Willums says. “It’s the users who come up with those features. We just give them the platform.”
Think plans to sell the car but lease the battery as a way to overcome one of the biggest conundrums of electric cars. The battery is by far the most expensive component of the City, which will list for about $34,000 in Norway. Take the battery out of the equation, and Willums says he can sell the car for about $15,000 to $17,000 in the United States, with a “mobility fee” of $100 to $200 a month that might also include services like insurance and wireless Internet access.
Each car will come equipped with a Web-enabled “black box” to monitor the battery’s performance. When the car loses some of its range as the battery degrades, Think will offer buyers the option of replacing it at the same cost or paying a lower monthly fee.
Expensive batteries look more practical once you realize that PG&E is considering buying up old, used batteries, because they still retain enough capacity to store green energy from wind farms.
I’m still not quite sure how well the Stirling engines fit into the whole project though.