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Meet Frankie, “the ute that looks like a Ford Ranger, acts like a Nissan Leaf and drives like a dream”.
It was brought to life by Takarua Mutu from Mountain Bike Rotorua and Ra Cleave from engineering firm RippleTech and, as Mutu says, it’s an attempt to take the company's decarbonisation efforts a step further and do something a bit more meaningful.
The conversion features a 40kWh Leaf battery and 110kw Leaf motor and, come December, it will be operating in the forest as a 4WD transport vehicle for bikers.
Rather than send vehicles that are nearing the end of their life to the scrap heap, Mutu says there is an opportunity to revive them, just as Mike Casey did with his 1989 Toyota ‘electrolux’.
“I’m supposed to give it up for work, but I love it,” he says. “It’s the first electric vehicle I’ve owned and I feel like I’ve started at the top.”
As Minister of energy, climate and local government, Simon Watts had a great opportunity to push the country towards cheaper, cleaner and more reliable New Zealand-made energy. And that’s why we laid down a challenge and gave him the ‘MegaWatts’ moniker last year. Rewiring Aotearoa CEO Mike Casey says he did some good things, like enabling more solar on farms, removing tax on solar exports, fixing onerous solar consenting requirements, putting pressure on the lines companies to pull up their socks, and getting the ball rolling on the Ratepayer Assistance Scheme. "But the LNG import terminal appears to have been a defining issue."
Read moreDownloadAfter ‘crunching the numbers’ and adding in new sources of ‘New Zealand-made energy’ to our equations, CEO Mike Casey has announced that Rewiring Aotearoa will be changing its name to Refuelling Aotearoa. There has been a huge amount of independently verified research showing electrification beats fossil fuels on economics, efficiency, emissions and energy security and that there is a huge opportunity for New Zealand to electrify, but the discovery of an infinite supply of snake oil in New Zealand has changed everything, he says.
Read moreDownload"We’ve got fuel prices climbing towards four dollars a litre. We’ve got global instability, supply lines under pressure, and once again New Zealand is sitting here — exposed. But what’s different this time…it’s the reaction."