So I didn't know whether to put this here or under EV conversions but there's this official company in Turkey called "DMA", abbr. for "Derindere Motorlu Araçlar" They have been developing their own EV technologies since 2007 in Turkey and they're a subsidy of a company called Derindere, the official importer/reseller/servicer of Toyota vehicles in Turkey. They are very popular and pretty much like the only importer of Toyotas in the country. (needless to say they sell thousands of Toyotas every year)
What they do is they put their own technology into Toyota vehicles, (brand new ones) replacing the ICE part with their own EV structure. They make and sell EVs like this that cost almost 3X as the base Toyota and because of the lack of EV consciousness in Turkey they are very unpopular. They came up with their second product recently, implemented into the new version of the Toyota Corolla and this "+" version can go 400kms with one full charge using something like 53kWh battery. I believe they've made only one of this into a taxi serving in Istanbul to test and I got the chance to ride in one.(you can find my bit on them on my Tesla Blog, in Turkish, you can see photos) 0-60 is ~10 seconds which isn't bad. They also use li-ion battery of course goes without saying. Their old version, old "Corolla" had a 40kWh battery that could go 280km with one full charge. I saw at least 5 of them cruising around in Istanbul with their green sticking out "EV" stickers. That's how I recognised them of course since they're virtually indistinguishable from a regular Toyota Corolla physically. But there are a row of them around.
There aren't a whole lot of information out there about them since they're very underrated and besides for research purposes I think they sell to order only. The new + version Corolla costs ~70K USD. What made me post about them here is a statement I saw of their Chairman. He says; (Regarding Tesla) "We have better technology than the leading performance electric vehicle maker in the world, they have more than 12,000 cells in their cars whereas we can go 400kms with 400 cells. We can individually see which pack is heating and disable it if necessary with our software. You can't do that sort of thing with 12,000 batteries"
Obviously this isn't a very credible statement since you'd assume Tesla considering this option with their years of experience + being worth billions. It is a very interesting statement however as obviously using probably large amperage(capacity) cells would question the lifespan, reliability of those cells. Since they don't "really" sell commercially we don't have a users forum or a whole lot of information about their cars. What do you guys think? I just wanted to share.
Here's a link to their official website. (they have English)
Here's the news bit I was talking about the statement of the chairman.
Photo of their 400km range new version Corolla with ~50kWh li-ion battery. (it is serving as a taxi in Istanbul right now, probably being tested that way, judging by the DMA stickers it has despite all other old versions still having DMA stickers)
What they do is they put their own technology into Toyota vehicles, (brand new ones) replacing the ICE part with their own EV structure. They make and sell EVs like this that cost almost 3X as the base Toyota and because of the lack of EV consciousness in Turkey they are very unpopular. They came up with their second product recently, implemented into the new version of the Toyota Corolla and this "+" version can go 400kms with one full charge using something like 53kWh battery. I believe they've made only one of this into a taxi serving in Istanbul to test and I got the chance to ride in one.(you can find my bit on them on my Tesla Blog, in Turkish, you can see photos) 0-60 is ~10 seconds which isn't bad. They also use li-ion battery of course goes without saying. Their old version, old "Corolla" had a 40kWh battery that could go 280km with one full charge. I saw at least 5 of them cruising around in Istanbul with their green sticking out "EV" stickers. That's how I recognised them of course since they're virtually indistinguishable from a regular Toyota Corolla physically. But there are a row of them around.
There aren't a whole lot of information out there about them since they're very underrated and besides for research purposes I think they sell to order only. The new + version Corolla costs ~70K USD. What made me post about them here is a statement I saw of their Chairman. He says; (Regarding Tesla) "We have better technology than the leading performance electric vehicle maker in the world, they have more than 12,000 cells in their cars whereas we can go 400kms with 400 cells. We can individually see which pack is heating and disable it if necessary with our software. You can't do that sort of thing with 12,000 batteries"
Obviously this isn't a very credible statement since you'd assume Tesla considering this option with their years of experience + being worth billions. It is a very interesting statement however as obviously using probably large amperage(capacity) cells would question the lifespan, reliability of those cells. Since they don't "really" sell commercially we don't have a users forum or a whole lot of information about their cars. What do you guys think? I just wanted to share.
Here's a link to their official website. (they have English)
Here's the news bit I was talking about the statement of the chairman.
Photo of their 400km range new version Corolla with ~50kWh li-ion battery. (it is serving as a taxi in Istanbul right now, probably being tested that way, judging by the DMA stickers it has despite all other old versions still having DMA stickers)
