The Middle East, awash in oil, is about the last place you might think of when it comes to electric vehicles. But a company in Oman says it will develop an electric vehicle capable of 2,236 miles on a charge.
Yes, you read that right. And yes, we are just as skeptical of this claim as you are.
Sultan bin Hamad al-Amri, chief executive office of Noor Majan, offered no explanation whatsoever of how the unnamed vehicle will achieve such stupendous range. Nor did he say when we might see this wonder car. But he did say it would have an 800-horsepower motor, even if he didn't call it that in the story we found in the English-language Times of Oman.
"The parts of the car, including the 800-horsepower engine, are manufactured in Japan, America, Germany and Hong Kong," he said, according to the story, which we discovered through UPI by way of Autoblog Green.
We thought something might have been lost in translation by UPI, and the actual figures are 223 miles and 80 horsepower, but no.
We tracked down the Times of Oman report, and it plainly states a claimed range of 3,600 kilometers. What's more, al-Amri says the car will cost $70,000 to $91,000 and do zero to 60 in 4 seconds -- two things that don't jibe with an 80-horsepower car, unless it's made entirely of carbon fiber and other exotic materials and weighs less than a supermodel.
Al-Amri says the air conditioner will run on solar power, and the seats will offer soothing massages, neither of which are unusual. Toyota uses solar cells to circulate air through the car (not run the HVAC system, as we earlier stated) in the Prius, and the Ford Taurus features massaging seats. Harder to believe is his boast that the car will run 21 years without maintenance.
Al-Amri says he's already received preliminary approval from various government ministries to build the car.
We're at a loss to explain how the car might get anything approaching the range al-Amri is claiming -- apparently in all seriousness. At 245 miles (claimed), the Tesla Roadster has the best range of any EV and by far the biggest battery. The 53 kilowatt-hour pack weighs 950 pounds and is a big part of the reason the Roadster costs $109,000. Most of the electric cars coming down the pike promise 70 to 100 miles.
Yes, a hypermiler squeezed 313 miles out of a Tesla, and EV enthusiasts in Tokyo built a car that goes 624 miles. But those are rare exceptions. Even the best hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicle (that we know of) -- the Toyota FCHV-adv -- tops out at 516 miles.
But 2,236 miles? Seriously? If anyone's got legitimate ideas on how this might be possible, we'd honestly like to hear them. We've asked an automotive engineer, an EV-battery expert and David Friedman of the Union of Concerned Scientists about these claims. They all said, essentially, "Uh-huh. Sure."
"Honestly, the claims sound like something you might read in the satirical newspaper the Onion," Friedman, research director of the clean vehicles program at the Union, told us. "An incredibly good electric vehicle would require 0.1 kWh per mile (the Nissan Leaf requires over 0.2 kWh per mile) and would need a battery of at least 225 kWh. So driving over 2,000 miles would mean a battery ten to twenty times larger than the one in the Leaf. If there is a battery with this much energy that could actually fit in a car it would be the revolution of the century. I'll avoid holding my breath."
Maybe al-Amri isn't talking about using batteries. Maybe he's going to build the Ford Nucleon (pictured), a nuclear concept car that promised a range of 5,000 miles. It wouldn't be any more outlandish than some of the claims we're hearing in the EV sector these days.
UPDATED 1:45 p.m. Friday, June 18 to include David Friedman's comments.
Photo: TheFord Nucleon/Courtesy Ford
We used this photo, because the Nucleon is mentioned in the post, and we could not find an image of the vehicle al-Amri is referring to.
