Thank you for this test! A couple of things! The Sodium battery was not an “earlier” battery, it was the normal battery though the life of the model (in Norway and Europe). And while it is true, that to keep the salt molten, the car has to be plugged in to the mains, it is far from as bad as you make it sound! The battery is very weil isolated and has an internal warming element the will keep the temperature up for many days by using energy from the battery! Upon reaching a low SOC it will run a cooling down/freezing program, to unfreeze an Zebra battery (the name of the battery), takes a couple of days, (haven’t tried that) I have 3 Think City’s at the moment, one running and one that I hope will run eventually, and my first whit’s I keep for parts! My first Thin run for 120 000 Km, then I got a spear car with only 40 000 on the clock but with a death battery! I put battery from my original car into the low kilometer car in where it has now run app. 10 000 km. And the capacity is just the same as it was when I first bought the first car 5 years ago! But it has to be to say that it is time (mostly due to the heat stress of 300 c. for years) that kill then of, knock wood but my battery is fine so fare! :-)
Thank you for the clarification! I had reservations about putting this in the video because it was just something the owner told me while I was filming, but I had to leave it in because it was just too interesting. Now I know the full story!
One of the great th!ngs about the Zebra battery was that it doesn't really care about ambient temperature, so winter range is almost the same as summer range. Normal EV's Lithium-ion batteries perform badly in cold weather, and get damaged in too hot weather. However, the Zebra battery is more fragile and can't be fast charged (a huge issue). Thanks for doing a Think, it makes me feel weirdly proud to be Norwegian, watching this automotive flop get some recognition aboad.
Could this Sodium Battery tech be used on Drones? Would it be an improvement one Lithium Ion? ( I don't know anything much on batteries) . Patent 672256 .
But look on the bright side, if you leave it under the sunlight for long enough the battery will eventually heat up to 300 degrees and the car will become drivable!
+NOCH Norway made good cars its just they overpriced it so damn much. Troll car in the 50s, they made 5 of them and they actually sold a few of those tiny numbers to customers. It was the first plastic car in Europe and frankly it was vastly better than Trabant, Troll compared to Trabant would be like comparing Mercedes Benz at the time to a horsedrawn carriage.
At Ford's Technical Centre in Dunton UK, the management used these basically as golf carts to get around the facility. They had a special charging place by the front door and even as a kid visiting my dad's work on an open day, I can still remember seeing how up close the plastic on these things reminded me of those Fisher Price outdoor playsets that are clearly made from recycled plastic.
Back when I was a teenager I had a hobby of collecting car brochures and got one from the Ford-era Th!nk for some reason. I'm amazed they lasted as long as they did. I figured it died fifteen years ago.
My first car was a Citroen AX mk2 diesel powered turd. I loved it and I still miss it. It had a 53 horse power old school tractor sounding diesel engine and similar to the Th!nk, it had a glass boot but the lower half was made of actually decent plastic. Never had any issued with it. And contrary to my current car, it had an amazing mileage, about 75 mpg!
I do remember hearing about the ThInk City a while back when NEVs (Neighborhood Electric Vehicles) were a big deal in the news...then the whole thing just seemed to drop off the face of the Earth and I never heard anything more about them.
I'm obviously late to the ball, but an interesting fact I found is that the listed price for a new 2002 Th!nk was around 160' NOK which translates to around 16' USD. How they managed to list it at 36' USD in 2011 is mindblowing...
1). Norway taxes the crap out of cars IIRC 2) with some battery and power electronics/charging updates it's probably as good a very small EV as one could build today.
A sub 25k price, electric power steering and an modern 30 kw battery this would work. Today. I know it would be an awesome second car in the Caribbean. This is what I would hope an Honda electric car would be like. More quality slightly more room and an sub 30k price. Hopefully just as basic. Manual controls and analog gauges.
My dad almost started working at the Th!nk factory but, they didn't offer a good enough pay for him to accept, a few months later the factory shut down. He did not regret his choice. there is still quite a few of these around here in Norway.
Neighbor down the street had one for a couple of years and always drove it around town. I did notice that the plastic was slowly fading. Last year he replaced it with a Volt.
Not only have a heard about it.. a friend of my worked at the factory as a logistics paper pusher over a few years The sodium battery should last about 72 hours with out recharging. The thing is. When the car is driven, the batteries freeze up as the batteries get discharged. This is actually how the energy is stored.. So the car is losing a stedy state of range when its not in the charger. This is actually true about all electric cars, but for a modern lithium powered car, we are really talking about years, not days
Ok, this is strange. I saw one of these last week here in Monterey California, and though to myself that I should take a pic of this and send it to you to see if you have seen one. Obviously you have! Thanks for the vid, now when I see it again, I'll ask the owner about it and see if I can get more info!
Having left Norway in 2012, I did not expect to ever see an ELBIL* again...! So this is a very pleasant surprise! Saw these little buggers parked everywhere in Oslo when I used to frequent it (something to do with huge financial and mobility incentives to go electric, which they dropped when everyone got Teslas and it clogged the initiative to death), they were a bit of a joke, but with their relative ubiquity, they must've been doing something right! (*"Bil" meaning "car", so ELectric car. No one ever called these by their brand name, just "ELBIL" in a somewhat snide tone to denote their joke status. I assume e-cars since then have taken on a bit of a better image...!)
Nope, the only reason people buy them is because the goverment subsidies the car with around 50000$ Its a car for snobs and people who like beeing watched, I've never personally met anyone who bougth it to save the environment. Plus, some of the hydroelectric power are sold out of the country so basicly they run on coal and nuclear made power from time to time :p Also electric cars does go through toll booths for free, also free parking. So in bigger cities it really does pay off to get an electric car :p
Indeed it is, but its not particulary environment friendly if the power comes from coal. For a city situation I completely understand buying an electric car. But as soon as you have to pay the full price for a tesla, and pay for parking and toll booths. Nobody will buy an electric car anymore :p
Actually The Th!nk City is the reason the Norway has the highest ratio of EV/Fossil fuel Vehicle in the world, because they wanted to help start a Norwegian car industry! , (my hypothesis :-) )
I got to ride in a Ford Th!nk in New York City back in 2000 during The American Tour De Sol. The one I rode in was Blue and from what I remember it was pretty peppy. Thanks for bringing back the memories. I was there as a competitor and I had nearly forgotten about the ride in the Th!nk.
Great Video! I live in Elkhart, In. and I have been an electric car Enthusiast for many years. The first Electric car I ever drove/ worked on was the Commuta Car. My career experience is in Electronics, so when I heard that Think was coming to Elkhart, I had visions of working for the company. I was delivering pizza at the time and saw how the Think would be valuable to deliver pizza. I got ahold of a representative of the company ( who drove down from Detroit, I found out later)for a test drive. I got to drive the car around Elkhart. I mentioned what I wanted to use it for and the Rep somehow thought I wanted buy a fleet of them for the pizza company. I repeated multiple times in the original call that I wanted to test ONE for my own use. So as the test drive ended, the rep seriously wanted to know how many I wanted to buy, when I said I was only interested in one, I got the distinct impression he was under the impression I would buy quantity.... I got a tour of the "Factory " and saw maybe 20 vehicles in process.. I found out this factoid.. the car was about 90% built in Norway, and shipped to Elkhart for the tail light system to be installed and a few other things put on the car to make it U.S. road legal. I was told that the tail lights were different in Norway and that it would NOT meet U.S. auto standards as is from Norway.. So Elkhart was more of a staging facility than an actual 'from-raw-materials-to-complete -car' factory I thought it was. I very much enjoyed the drive and got more enthused about E-Drive vehicles. Think did not have any lease program in force, so purchase was only option, so sticker price was definitely a non-starter... after the tour, I realized that a career there for me was essentially nonexistent. As a side note, the next town east , Mishawaka, Is the home of a Chinese Electric car company that is re-tooling the former H2 Hummer plant for U.S. Sales... I know next to nothing about this company, but am keeping eyes and ears open to what they can produce there.. This is where to start if you are interested... www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=www.southbendtribune.com/news/business/sf-motors-unveils-electric-vehicles-to-be-made-in-mishawaka/article_4ba28606-fe2e-5889-b5c1-ffade0d140cb.amp.html&ved=2ahUKEwi8z7u2443gAhUr7IMKHeS3AbYQFjAAegQIBRAB&usg=AOvVaw0NVk2NMks37IEXfdMwTYuq&cf=1&cshid=1548585771701
I grew up in Mishawaka and was going to school in Elkhart around 2012. I had no idea they made anything but RVs there, that's all you can see driving by on the toll road.
I would want a tiny electric car like this with 2 seats, a tiny trunk, and batteries that I can bring into my apartment and charge indoors then bring them back out and plug them in. Only need like 30-50 mile range to get around town, as I can't ride a bike or walk any significant distance, but I don't drive far.
Two reasons: Large production figures spreading the costs of tooling and production over many vehicles is the reason why other cars are cheaper - and they couldn't do it as a small upstart company. The other is obviously the batteries, which likely made up more than half of the price.
*I was going to open up a dealership selling those and used cars. Right as we were about to get it going the place went out of business* Would have been cool to have owned a dealership. EDIT guess I saw this video two years ago.
Viktor Honestly if rather watch Aging Wheels then Doug Demuro. Doug always rants about stuff he doesn’t like and makes fun of a manufacturer for a simple little mistake. Like dude just review the damn car i don’t care about you’re opinions.
@@ifGarage I wouldn't say Doug rants it's usually just pointing out weird things nobody would notice. That's my favorite part of looking at cars I dont have, noticing little things like that. It's great
Paul Carmi Yeah I know what you mean I love finding out little things about a car but doug will talk about that little thing for like 5 mins and then he’ll make fun of the company for including it.
a battery that freezes is why I never wanted that think car as I think what they said to I think and realized that a molten battery would freeze much faster in winter then me and thus stop working I did not know they replaced the molten batterys with lithium ion that makes me sad as I might have got one if I knew it had lithium ion but oh well
I've only heard of liquid salt batteries being used in very temporary engines, like ones that are designed to only last for about a minute before being destroyed completely. i never would have guessed a car would use one
