Tired of waiting for the market to deliver what he needed, Mike Casey, of Electric Cherries, took matters into his own hands spearheading a project to convert a 1989 flat deck ute using a battery from a Nissan Leaf.
Mr Casey’s six-year-old cherry orchard on the outskirts of Cromwell was certified fossil-free in 2022, but finding a fully electric, four-wheel drive farm vehicle to haul gear around and do town runs had proved a challenge.
"The big mover and shaker in this space is BYD with the BYD Shark, which is a plug-in hybrid that gets you about 80km on electric and then switches over to fossil fuels."
But, for a self-professed "massive advocate for electrification", a hybrid vehicle was not the end goal.
"I’d been wanting to create a fully electric ute to kind of prove that the technology could exist and then asking some questions as to why it doesn’t exist yet," Mr Casey said.
"So I found a really good, old Hilux ...We took an old Nissan Leaf motor and basically slotted it into the gearbox of the Hilux ... Then put a battery box under the tray."
Mr Casey wanted to achieve the conversion as cheaply as possible.
"You could spend a million dollars and create an electric Hilux, for sure, but that would be inaccessible to other people."
Mr Casey — a former tech entrepreneur turned orchardist — called on some mates to help handle parts of the mechanical side of the conversion, but the battery set-up itself was left well alone — it was high-voltage gear and not something to mess around with, he said.
That job was left to James Hardisty, who had been applying engineering know-how to convert classic vehicles to electric from his Dunedin workshop for more than 15 years, before EVs were even being produced commercially in any volume.
Mr Hardisty said, by reusing the motor and other electronic components from the Leaf and coupling them with the transmission of the Hilux, the conversion was "a bit special".
"We just had to fit a new brain in there — a new computer — that talks to all the existing components and makes them work again."
Despite what people might assume, the Leaf motor brought more horsepower to the Hilux, Mr Hardisty said.
"The motors are great, really reliable and really powerful ...[And] as a four-wheel drive, it’s really quiet and really controllable.
"Mike’s one was my prototype for making it cost-effective."
According to Mr Hardisty, a roadblock for ute conversions was the move towards "oversized trucks".
This conversion worked well because the ute was an older-school, compact, lightweight model, he said.
Mr Casey said there had been no shortage of feedback on the project, and he felt like there had been opportunity to "troll everybody".
"There is so much identity and emotion tied up with those old Hiluxes in this country, especially in rural New Zealand ... You get to annoy the people who don’t like big utes, you get to annoy the people who love big utes, and as a result you create something that’s quite topical."
The ute still needed to be road certified, and it was his view there was "a lot of red tape around conversions to be cut".
