While gas-guzzling, smoke-belching vehicles still dominate Indonesia’s roads, President Joko Widodo has ordered his ministers to draft regulations to support making electric cars a bigger part of the country’s future. Now, students and faculty from Surabaya State Electronic Polytechnic (PENS) say they have come up with an electric car design that is so inexpensive that we might actually see their large-scale adoption in Indonesia.
PENS’ faculty of Industrial Electrical Engineering recently unveiled the 6th generation of their electric car model, which they’ve named Smart Vi and say is ready for mass production.
Dr. Era Purwanto, a lecturer and researcher on Green Energy Transportation and Applications, said he worked with 20 students and five of his colleagues to create the car’s unique design, which can take it 180 kilometers on a single charge.
“The advantage in this electric car uses a three-phase induction motor to drive the car in lieu of a DC motor that is mostly used today,” Purwanto said on Monday at the launch as quoted by Okezone.
Era said work on electric cars have been going on at PENS since 2004 and altogether they’ve spent IDR600 million (US$44,500) on researching them with support from the government’s Ministry of Research and Technology. But if it the Smartvi is mass produced, all that research might have been well worth it.
“In terms of quality, the Smart Vi is not inferior to other cars of its kind. And when mass produced, surely the price would be much cheaper, being in the range of IDR80-90 million (US$6,000-6,800) per unit. And because this is the work of our nation’s children, we can be proud,” Era said.
The lecturer said that they had also received strong support from the Surabaya government, who have suggested the small cars could be used as public transportation vehicles.
However, one thing holding the Smart Vi back from mass production is the Ministry of Industry, which Era said has still not given their approval despite the initial designs being submitted in 2013. Hopefully, Jokowi’s new directive that ministries support the development of electric cars will help PENS get the license for the Smart Vi finally approved.
In fact, electric cars from American-manufacturer Tesla are already being sold here, but their sky-high prices make them inaccessible to all but the richest Indonesians.
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