This is excellent news. It's good to see someone like Smith EV just getting on with making and selling electric vehicles, when so many people are issuing excuses as to why we can't have them yet. They have obviously identified a market in which the known limitations of battery powered vehicles are not a problem. Depot based fleets in which the trucks return to where they started and can recharge overnight - and where a distance of a hundred miles between charges is plenty.

TNT is obviously convinced that EVs make economic sense. Hardheaded fleet managers don't go buying 150 trucks just to impress environmentalists!

And Smith are apparently coming to America. Working in conjunction with Ford they are are about to open a factory on US soil producing this Smith Faraday model based on the Ford F650 http://i29.tinypic.com/307raqg.jpg

That particular vehicle doesn't feature on Smith's website http://www.smithelectricvehicles.com but the site is quite can eye-opener. Check out their customer case histories!

Is the sodium nickel chloride battery toxic? I've heard some people say that it's a trade-off--clean energy for toxic waste products from the batteries. They're hard to dispose of and we're going to be dealing with a ton of them as more people convert to battery powered cars. Then there's the fact that the energy for charging them may not be clean either...