Renault has announced that it is currently working on an all-electric city car and hopes to have it to market by the 2012 Olympics, which will be held in London, England. The new car will be engineered from the ground up and will be Renault’s first electric car since its 1992 Zoom concept car.
“If we are ready, the new all-electric car could be launched in time for the London Olympics,” Patrick Pelata, Renault’s director of product planning, told AutoExpress. “We are maximizing things to aim for then, and the car would be sold from that point onwards.”
Pelata also indicated that Renault’s electric car would be about the size of the Twingo.
Renault execs are also considering a few different battery strategies, including renting batteries to owners and offering two different battery packs — a smaller unit for day-to-day driving and a larger one for weekend trips.
Interestingly, Nissan — a company owned by Renault — has already announced that it plans to launch an all-electric vehicle in 2012, likely based on the Nissan Cube. Seeing that electric vehicle technology is expensive to develop — particularly the batteries — look for the two companies to launch their own vehicles based on the same platform.
