South Africa’s electric car developer, Optimal Energy, would close its doors, the company said in a statement released on the weekend.

Over the last few months, the board and management of the Cape Town-based company, together with the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) and the Technology Innovation Agency (TIA), had been working on a revised strategy for Optimal Energy, following the company’s failure to secure the about R7-billion funding required for the development and industrialisation of its Joule electric passenger car.




The new strategy would have used the existing intellectual property developed by Optimal Energy for the Joule to develop an electric bus.

An electric bus could offer local bus rapid transit systems a 15% to 20% life-cycle saving, compared with diesel buses, Optimal Energy CEO Kobus Meiring told Engineering News Online in an April interview. He noted that Optimal Energy needed government to provide funding for the bus project, otherwise the company would most likely find itself in dire straits. “We need a cheque in the hand before end May,” he added.




However, as the IDC and TIA decided not to fund the bus project, the board on June 21 decided to shut down Optimal Energy “as soon as possible”.

Optimal Energy was founded in 2005.

“While funded by TIA and the IDC, Optimal Energy proved its ability to develop an electric drive train and battery system through the Joule electric passenger car, a vehicle that has been internationally praised by motoring journalists for its performance”, said Optimal Energy in its statement.

“Although successfully launched in Paris in 2008 and Geneva in 2010 and attracting the interest of more than 130 distributors worldwide, the development of the Joule EV has been hampered by the slow availability of funding. Although further investigations into the development of alternative mobility solutions to create a revenue stream for Optimal Energy have been investigated, and reviewed by both TIA and the IDC, it was concluded that although the project is technically possible, there were several commercial risks that threatened the success of the project.”

Meiring said he was “extremely disappointed” about the demise of the company, but added that he remained “confident about the future of electric mobility”.