Simferopol International Airport has become a platform for testing a freight electric vehicle designed and manufactured at the Eltavr Crimean Research and Production Enterprise.
For ten days, the electric car was put through a test run transporting baggages and cargo at the airfield. The fully electric vehicle is capable of carrying one tonne of cargo, and a further five tonnes in pulled carts. Fully charged in 3.5 hours, it has a range of 150km for each full charge.
There are future plans to make the vehicle driverless. A prototype unmanned version of an electric vehicle has already been tested at the Dmitrov training ground.
The vehicle is very much a local initiative, with the steel frame and fiberglass body being made in Simferopol. The engine has been modernised specifically for the vehicle, which runs on lithium-iron-phosphate batteries which are designed for daily operation for 15 years.
General Director of Simferopol International Airport LLC, Evgeni Plaksin, welcomed the trial’s success and noted the vehicle as one of “many samples of specialised equipment of Russian production” at Simferopol.
