Roev EV ute to kickstart local car manufacturing

Australia’s full-scale automotive manufacturing industry died with the Ford Falcon/Territory, Toyota Camry/Aurion and the homegrown Holden Commodore in 2016-2017, but it could return within a few years.

While low-volume car manufacturing continues Down Under with the likes of Adelaide-based Brabham Automotive, and more full-size pick-ups are being converted to right-hand drive than ever before, high-volume car-making could be revived Down Under by an unexpected Aussie EV start-up.

Roev began work on its first locally designed and engineered ute three years ago.

The finished product could be on sale by about 2026 – and it could be as Aussie as any car ever manufactured here previously.

“We’re actively engaging in the development of our own EV ute as we speak,” Roev CEO Noah Wasmer, a former executive with software giant Atlassian, told carsales.

“It does take additional work and time to get that full manufacturing vision to be real.”

Speaking days after the company announced plans to provide EV conversions for Toyota HiLux and Ford Ranger utes, Wasmer says Roev is deep into the development of an electric ute that will be created from the ground up.

“We’ve been testing these vehicles for years … in different form factors,” says Wasmer.

“We started with some really hard vehicles like an ADF [Land Rover] Perentie.”

As a heavy vehicle with almost no thought given to aerodynamics, Wasmer says the Perentie provided a great basis from which to collect data.

“We’ve taken … years of learnings … and we’ve been using them to really test the technology, both software and hardware.”

The goal is to take those learnings and inject them into saleable vehicles. Roev wants a homemade electric ute on the market “in the next few years”.

Rather than an enormous factory pumping out hundreds of thousands of cars annually, however, Roev is planning ‘micro-factories’, which it says can operate profitably on as few as 10,000 vehicles annually.

By adding three shifts Roev can triple that production and the company can replicate those factories in other parts of the country and its nearby neighbours.

But it has no plans to be the next Tesla and take on the world.

“If you told me we have such amazing success that we need to build millions of vehicles I’ll tell you that we’re not architected right to build millions of vehicles,” said Wasmer.

Plugging the revenue gap between now and when that Roev-designed ute eventuates are plans to create EV conversions of existing utes.

Australia’s two best-sellers – HiLux and Ranger – are at the top of the list, although Wasmer says the plug-and-play nature of the electrical architecture currently under development makes it applicable to other vehicles.

“We believe if we design the battery boxes and some of the drivetrain correctly that it will be able to work within many vehicles,” he said.

Key to the planned Australian-made bespoke Roev ute are the batteries, the most expensive and complex component of any EV.

Wasmer is hoping the prospect of scale manufacturing and conversion of EVs will fast-track plans already bubbling away to locally manufacture cells and entire battery packs.

“The long-term idea is that we can source battery cells directly from Australia,” he said.

“We have those minerals … we could have the lowest [carbon] footprint battery in the world.”

If that happens, it could make the Roev electric ute as Australian as any car has ever been.

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