The development of electric vehicles started from 1966. As you know, at that time Mitsubishi Motors still belonged to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd., but Mitsubishi Motors had already been developing electric vehicles mainly for the electric power company's use in its power-generating stations or sales divisions up to the early 1990s.
In 1994, I then took on the job related to electric vehicles. The electric vehicles developed up to then had been using the lead-battery, but it was very difficult to extend the cruising range by using the lead-battery. In order to provide sufficient performances of vehicles, it was necessary to load a lot of batteries, which resulted in heavier vehicles. Also the electric vehicles were expensive because of prototype-like fabricated, even though they are in production. I was then in charge of the development of Libero EV, which was the last vehicle using the lead-battery and highly priced at 11,230,000. Amazingly, this price was higher than the Mitsubishi's top-of-the-line luxury car “Debonair” at that time. After all, the 36 units of Libero EVs were sold in total for the electric power company's use only, not for the public use.
We felt embarrassed that the Libero EV had a lot of problems with performances and cost, and as a most basic problem, the Libero EV was not a car that we could use normally. So, we just wanted to make the electric vehicle's battery smaller so that we could use it normally.
When I just started to be engaged in the research work of electric vehicles, the lithium-ion was starting to appear in the market for the mobile phone use. Then, we struggled to make the lithium-ion battery useful for electric vehicles at in-house.
The first electric vehicle installing the lithium-ion battery of Mitsubishi Motors was the Chariot-based vehicle, which was announced in 1995 as a name of the “Chariot HEV”.
The Chariot HEV has extended the cruising range up to 60 miles (about 96km) by installing the lithium-ion battery. This vehicle was actually, as it were, a pioneer of the plug-in hybrid vehicle, which runs on the battery at start, and then runs on the generator if the battery has run out.
Yes, the Chariot HEV was exhibited in the Tokyo Motor Show held in November 1995, then it was subjected to the Californian environment agency's tests. As you know, the Californian state suffered from the air pollution problem at that time, and the ZEV bill (stating that 10% of the major seven car makers' cars to be sold in California state until 2003 shall be zero-emission vehicles) had been promoted. That's why we carried out the verification tests.
I was sure electric vehicles would become a completely sure thing with the future environmental trends, considering global warming or oil resources running-out problems.
