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Surabaya. A group of doctoral students from 10 November Technological Institute has finished building an initial version of a car that they say runs solely on electricity.

“Hybrid cars still use gas, which means they still emit carbon,” said Dedic Cahya Hafianto, one of the students.

“Our car runs purely on electricity, which makes it is an environmentally friendly vehicle.”

Dedic and his fellow inventors are part of the electronics doctoral program at the institute, also known as ITS.

The project took two years to develop, and the students received an Rp 82 million ($8,700) grant from the government to help them realize the invention.

The students used a modified 1972 Honda Life, which they purchased for Rp 7 million. They replaced the car’s fuel-powered engine with 42 12-volt batteries, which were able to generate about 500 volts of power onto a 380-volt motor.

During initial tests, the car, called the Elits, which stands for ITS electronics, traveled at a maximum speed of 20 kilometers per hour on a flat road. The students said they were designing a car that would be used primarily in the city, so they did not emphasize speed. However, future versions of the car would be built to travel up to 60 kph.

“We intended it to be that way,” Dedit said. “Besides, the original car was really old, so we were expecting it to be slow.”

Dedit added that other aspects of the Elits also needed to be improved, particularly the kind of batteries that were used.

The batteries used in the test model took up too much space, crowding the area in the backseat and reducing the car to a four-seater.

Dedit also said the batteries proved too heavy, weighing a combined 600 kilograms.

Charging the batteries also took too long, he said, with an average time of between three and six hours. A six-hour charging time allowed the car to run for six hours, but only at speeds of up to 20 kph.

“The car is still not efficient,” Dedit said, adding that improvements would be made in the second-generation model.

In future models, Dedit said, they would reduce the number of batteries to four and add an “inverter booster” mechanism to increase electrical power. He added that his group planned to build a third-generation electric car before mass producing the vehicle.

Unlike electric cars, hybrid vehicles, which are available in the market now, use electricity but switch to gasoline when the electricity supply runs out.