The story
History
João Augusto Conrado do Amaral Gurgel, a mechanical and electrical engineer, opened his company in São Paulo on 1 September 1969, and that month put his first car, the Ipanema buggy, on sale.source 1source 2 The oil crisis of 1973 brought shortages and price rises, and in 1974 Gurgel finished an electric car.source 2 It was shown at that year’s São Paulo Salão do Automóvel, and it was the first electric car developed in Latin America.source 3source 4source 2source 1 He named it Itaipu, after the hydro-electric dam then under construction on the border of Brazil and Paraguay.source 3source 2source 1
It was a two-seater with two doors and a trapezoidal body of glass fibre on Plasteel, Gurgel’s patented frame of glass fibre and steel tubes, 2,650 mm (104 in) long, 1,400 mm (55 in) across.source 2source 5 Quatro Rodas later said that it would have been called a micro-MPV, had the term existed.source 2 A compound-wound DC motor of 3 kW (4.2 hp), mounted lengthways under the middle of the car, drove the rear wheels through a single reduction gear; a lever beside the wheel chose forward, neutral or reverse.source 2source 5 Ten 12-volt lead-acid batteries in series gave it 120 volts. They weighed 320 kg (705 lb), and the whole car 780 kg (1,720 lb).source 3source 5 The dashboard had a speedometer in the middle, an ammeter on one side and a voltmeter on the other.source 2
A car with its own charging post
Quatro Rodas drove the prototype in January 1975. It had a three-spoke sports steering wheel and magnesium wheels, three batteries in front, two behind the seats and five at the back, and it would do 30 km/h (19 mph).source 2 Gurgel’s plan went beyond the car. From June 1975 a fleet of 20 would run on the streets of Rio Claro, where his factory was, to test the car and a system to go with it: each car would have its own parking space, with a small post carrying its charging socket.source 2 Pesquisa FAPESP adds that he meant to rent the cars out from charging points around the town.source 6 Series production was to start in December 1975, at the price of a Volkswagen Fusca 1300, which in December 1974 was Cr$22,577.source 2
The later cars carried their batteries behind the seats and under the floor, with a separate 12-volt battery in front for the lights, and reached 60 km/h (37 mph).source 3source 2source 5 A full charge took ten hours.source 2source 1source 5 In 2007 the owner of a surviving car told Quatro Rodas that it went 60 to 80 km on a charge; Autoesporte gives 50 km.source 2source 1 Its tester found it impressively silent, easy to manoeuvre and steady under braking, at about 50 km/h, though the fixed seats made it awkward to get in.source 2 An electrical engineer from the Gurgel club explained why the motor’s two field windings suited it: the series winding gave strong pulling from rest, the shunt winding even control of speed.source 2
Never on sale
It never went on general sale. The weight of the batteries, their small capacity and the ten-hour charge kept it a pre-series car: Autoesporte calls these problems that still exist today. The federal government did not back battery development, and Gurgel gave up electric cars.source 2source 1 About twenty pre-series cars were built by English Wikipedia’s account, or 27 by Autoesporte’s; both say they are now collectors’ items.source 3source 1 The Itaipu name came back on the larger E400 electric van of the early 1980s, used by power and telephone companies, which became the basis of Gurgel’s G800 van.source 3source 2source 1source 6
Gurgel himself went on to the BR-800; as a student he had wanted to design a popular car for his final project.source 6 Over 27 years his firm sold about 30,000 vehicles and exported about 4,000 to more than 40 countries, and he liked to call it not multinacional but muitonacional, “very national”, for its wholly Brazilian capital; it went bankrupt in 1994.source 1source 6 The Itaipu belongs to the third wave of electric microcars, the one set off by the oil crisis, alongside the American CitiCar and the Italian Zagato Zele.
