EU

A European consortium of 19 cities and regions, 12 electricity suppliers and 17 carmakers have joined forces in a bid to undertake a major effort to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles.

The EVA (Electric Vehicles for Advanced cities) consortium, which is being coordinated by the city of Rotterdam, hopes to secure funding from the European Commission as part of the Green Car Initiative.

The project itself plans to gather information from the deployment of over 9500 electric vehicles on European roads to support their integration into urban environments for local journeys and accelerate their rollout across the region.

Carmakers already committed to the project include BMW, Fiat, Mitsubishi, Nissan- Renault, Peugeot and Volvo.

The partnering cities and regions, which include London, the North East, Edinburgh, Barcelona, Berlin, Stockholm, Paris and Rome, already boast 14,000 charging points and so could also serve to investigate vehicle-to-grid interactions.

The consortium says that the largest ever European demonstration of electric vehicles would support the development of standards, recommendations and roadmaps for the general deployment of electric vehicles.

“The proposals from the EVA Consortium would greatly increase the number of electric vehicles on Europe’s roads and accelerate the development of key technologies like Smart Grids,” says Chris Pywell of One North East in the UK.

For further information:
www.onenortheast.co.uk

Related stories:
North east England launches electric car charging network (20-Oct 2009)
Electric car trial launched in North East England (15-Sept 2009)