The C-E-O of an Ames company that’s managing the assembly and sale of electric vehicles says the company’s station wagons, trucks and cargo vans are “full-size” and can go fast enough to break the posted speed limits on the state’s highways.
EnVision Motor Company announced today that it will ship electric vehicles assembled at a facility in New York to a plant in Webster City. Workers in Webster City will finish the vehicles by installing the electric drive train. EnVision president and C.E.O. Thomas Gleisner says these electric vehicles can reach a top speed of about 85 miles an hour.
“They’re long-range, highway-speed, full-size, fully-crash-tested vehicles,” he says. “Just like any other car, they just don’t burn gas.”
These Electric Mobile Cars — EMC’s — can go about 200 miles on a charge, depending on how fast you drive, how much weight the vehicle is carrying and how much the vehicle has to battle wind friction.
“Most people drive an average of 36 miles a day,” Gleisner says. “If our car achieves a 200-mile range, the majority of drivers can go anywhere he or she wants to go.”
Gleisner’s company, EnVision, is the U.S. distributor of these European-designed vehicles. The completed vehicle will roll off the assembly line at Auto Manufacturing Systems in Webster City, an already-existing plant.
“Webster City seems like it’s the community that can make about anything,” Gleisner says. “The manufacturing base there has a proven track record of making quality goods and having a great workforce and I just think that it’s the perfect spot to do the assembly on our vehicles and then to add the manufacturing for any accessories or toppers for our trucks or bike racks or anything that would go along with our vehicles.”
More than 300 workers will be added at the plant to work on the assembly of the vehicles, a welcome employment boost in Webster City as 850 workers will lose their jobs when the Electrox plant shuts down next year.