Volvo Cars China and Shanghai International Automobile City Group – a local government supervision authority – has decided to undertake a fleet demonstration program with a test fleet of two Volvo C30 Electric cars in the community of Jiading outside Shanghai.
The purpose is to gain better understanding of customer behavior and expectations from operating electric cars.
In January 2011, Shanghai was selected as an international electric vehicle pilot city by the Chinese government and the Jiading district of Shanghai was announced as an electric vehicle demonstration zone. An infrastructure with over 13,000 charging stations and 15 battery swapping stations is being built, in order to support the real life use of electric vehicles.
Electrification of cars is a clear strategy for the Chinese Government in order to reduce the country’s dependency on oil and longer term also to reduce CO2 emissions from transports.
In June 2011, Volvo Car Corporation started the production of the Volvo C30 Electric as a part of the company’s highly ambitious electrification strategy for the forthcoming years.
The Volvo C30 Electric is manufactured in the Volvo Cars Ghent plant in Belgium and finalized in the Torslanda plant in Sweden.
The cars are leased to customers in selected European countries and they are also currently operating in demonstration programs in Sweden and Belgium. In China, it is the intention to introduce additional Volvo C30 Electric cars into demonstration programs, including the one in Jiading.
The Volvo C30 Electric has a 20 kWh battery that is recharged from a regular household power socket. A full recharge takes about 7 hours. The operating range is up to 150 kilometers (93 miles) per full charge. The top speed is 130 km/h (81mph) and acceleration from 0-50 km/h (31mph) takes four seconds.
