Will electromobile take long to arrive in Russia?

Japanese automakers Toyota, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Fuji, Heavy Industries and Tokyo Electric Power have established an association to begin building stations for rapid re-charge of batteries electromobiles use. Mitsubishi, for one, plans to open the first charger station in 2012. Work on the environment-friendly vehicles is under way in many countries, but so far there is no market for them. The reason?  The hybrids that are already on the road are very costly, 20,000 to 40,000 Euros or more. But the price is not the only obstacle to overcome to welcome electromobiles in Russia in the foreseeable future. 

Mitsubishi has plans to build 1,000 charger stations in major cities and major stations of the rapid railway lines. Some of the 44,000 gas stations there already offer this service, and Tokyo officials say that by 2013 all the cars will run on electricity. Work on the car that charged once will run for 600 kilometres is lavishly funded, but it still has some sci-fi dimension. Present-day battery Toyotas, Nissans, Mitsubishis and GMs can only run for 15 to 60 kilometres at full charge. The Japanese may aim high, but experts are not exactly confident about the terms of such plans.

Editor-in-Chief of the Avtomir (Auto World) magazine Anton Maksimov sounds cautious about the future of the market for such vehicles. He reasons that their high production costs and consumer expenses are so far prohibitive for the cars their size: “The states that may choose to develop environment-friendly vehicles would have to invest heavily in their design. The market for electromobiles is developing but slowly at present, but there are already some positive results that help to reduce – be it even a little – their production costs. This market will develop, and maybe in a decade or so, if the manufacturers succeed in reducing production costs, one day they will become popular.”

As for Russia, it faces another problem that makes analysts cautious about forecasting. Analyst with the Metropole financial investment group Andrei Rozhkov thinks that the vastness of this country and especially its climate are serious obstacles for such cars making it fast enough: “In northerner climates as Russia’s, the prospects of developing this market segment are not as good as in Asian and European countries, where it will be less costly to re-equip gas stations. For example the German government plans to put on the road 1 million electric cars by 2020. Re-equipment of gas stations in Germany may cost 12 to 15 billion Euros. In the absence of frost-proof car batteries we have to take climate in consideration. Our winters and theirs are hard to compare, plus the cost of re-equipping our gas stations networks. So it is unlikely that such cars would be widely used in Russia in the coming decades.”