As you can see from the picture, taken right off of ElectricBrands website, the cup runneth over with options available to make your eBussy your very own.
The Tesla Roadster has been around seemingly forever, and it looks terrific. However, for those people out there who love the classics, a German company known as ElectricBrands has you covered with their eBussy. When I first saw the eBussy, I thought it would sprout a face and star in a Pixar movie or something, but I was wrong unless Pixar knows something that I don’t. It looked tall, it looked skinny, and it looked like it would take corners exclusively on two wheels in a dopey cartoon fashion. More research proved it was no laughing matter, and not only was the eBussy a real idea from a real company, but it was one vehicle with options ready to make it twenty unique ones. The eBussy isn’t just a dopey looking electric van, but rather an entire line of dopey looking electric vans (and other body styles).
After watching a minute-and-a-half sales video on their official website, I am much more informed as to what the eBussy is, and what it is trying to do. Basically, there are two chassis types, city and off-road. There are ten different body types that can be installed on (I assume) either chassis. There’s vans, pickups, dump trucks, cube vans, etc. Each one looks strikingly similar to an old Volkswagen microbus with a Jeep Renegade grille, as only the rear of the body changes with each option. They all seem to have a roof covered in solar panels to charge the massive amount of onboard batteries, and it appears that they all store the batteries in low-mounted slide-out drawers, perfect for a low centre of gravity and improved handling. The range is up to two-hundred kilometres, but it looks like there’s an optional battery upgrade that triples that estimate up to six-hundred kilometres. I always think of electric vehicles as heavy, but they claim a lightweight between four-hundred and fifty and six-hundred kilograms. The payload is actually more than the vehicle weight, up to one-thousand kilograms, so it’s no wimp, and that maths out, as it makes one-thousand Newton-metres of torque, which if I calculated correctly, is over seven-hundred foot-pounds. Inside, it has seats that fold flat, which most minivans have now, and they-re available as stand-alone (buckets) or bench style. The craziest feature has to be the steering. It’s drive-by-wire, so there’s no steering column, so it can be converted from left-hand drive to right-hand drive by sliding the steering wheel across the dash. As someone who prefers a steering box over rack-and-pinion for overall road feedback, I’m not so sure how much I’d enjoy this on a rutted highway or in the wind, but they may have some sort of computer compensation built right in. Prices start at around twenty-five grand Canadian at the current exchange rate, and pre-orders are up now.
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