Electricana 2025
This year’s Electricarna event was a blast from start to finish! The weather was wall to wall sunshine with a little breeze, the foodcart, Offsite – Brew and Bite, kept everyone satisfied with customisable bacon sandwiches and great coffee, and many visitors admired a wide range of electric vehicles, both old and new!! Although difficult to count every head, we are confident that between 400 and 500 people walked through the Reserve admiring the display.
Of course, the huge drawcard was the Tesla CyberTruck, proudly displayed with many people getting a close-up view of a very unique EV in every sense – I couldn’t get over the size of the tyres for a kick-off! Tesla personnel also offered drives in either a Model 3 or a Model Y to those who had booked a slot online, and they were very successful! As those of us who already drive an EV know, getting new people into the driving seat of an EV is a huge step towards moving them from ICE to EV!
In the ‘old’ category we had 3 EV conversions; a converted 1975 Mazda Bongo van which delivers freshly ground coffee around Rotorua, and so smelt divine; a Ford e-Ranger that moves bikes around at Mountain Bike Rotorua and a nearly completed Austin Allegro which arrived on a trailer, pulled by a BYD Shark hybrid ute, as it still requires certification to be road-worthy. However, Gavin Shoebridge happily demonstrated that the Allegro was indeed drivable using the BYD Shark’s V2L capability and a 10 m long cable! The Bongo and the e-Ranger arrived more conventionally on their own wheels! Both these conversions utilised batteries and motors from Nissan Leaf vehicles, and in the e-Ranger, custom-made bracketry allowed the Leaf motor to be mounted to the same points that the ICE engine did, which meant there were no chassis changes required.
The more conventional new EVs, brought by many of the Trust’s ‘EV owners family’, were a bunch of Teslas (Models S, 3, X and Y), 2 Volvos – EX30 and XC40, 2 Polestars – a 2 and a 3, an MG4, a Ford Mach-e, a Hyundai Kona, a Ford F150 Lightning (imported from the US and then converted from left hand drive to right), a Leaf, a Nissan e-NV 200 van and an Energica EV motorbike!
This year, we branched out to show some EV technology as well as EV vehicles. Ned from DriveEV Workshop had a Tesla portable V2L unit, which he uses when servicing vehicles in the wild, as it were, although here he was powering an air fryer cooking chicken dinosaurs and a coolbox with ice blocks for the kids! Members of the Chemistry Department at Auckland University demonstrated a prototype rechargeable zinc-air battery powering a scooter. Hikotron showed their smart, flexible EV charging solutions, designed for businesses or public sites, that offer a lease package, which essentially provides charging as a service.
Ned also demonstrated a solar inverter that could plug directly into a Leaf battery pack; even a 50% state-of-charge battery would provide the same capacity as a Tesla Powerwall at a fraction of the cost. However, it is proving hard to get hold of second-hand Leaf batteries that are no longer attached to a car because they have so many uses and are quickly snapped up.
The Trust offers huge thanks to all those who brought their EVs to the event – we couldn’t have done it without them! We are already into designing and planning next year’s Electricarna, at the same location. More information will be available on the website when we have locked in a date.
