EV specialists Fellten have branched out from Batmobiles to creating a portable charge point with global appeal. STEVE CROPLEY investigates

Fellten’s Chris Hazell: a born-again petrolhead who fully embraces EVs

SHUTTERSTOCK, JOHN BRADSHAW

“Fellten’s exotic history of EV creation proved the need for Charge Qube”

A flatbed truck carrying two severely damaged vehicles rolls slowly by as we stand chatting on a concrete apron outside the headquarters of Fellten, an EV technology company based in Yate, near Bristol.

Your first impression might be that these sorry vehicles have come to their last resting place, but not so. Instead, they’re beginning a second life every bit as useful as the first. The cars are EVs, specifically a Ford van and a Tesla Model 3 saloon, and they’re about to donate their most vital organs – their traction batteries – to a new, rule-changing project that promises to do more for cleaning the environment than all the ZEV mandates you can climb over.

These batteries will join other second-lifers in a new-tech Fellten high-voltage battery pack called Charge Qube, a 10ft ISO-certified corrugated steel container that can be moved singly or in groups wherever you want on the back of a truck. It comprises an array of up to eight (450kWh) second-life car batteries to provide affordable juice for electric cars where full-on grid connection is either difficult, inconvenient, too expensive or impossible.

According to Fellten co-founder Chris Hazell, whom we visited at Yate to hear the story, Charge Qube is the first product in his six-yearold company’s already busy history that isn’t “passion driven” by a simple love of cars. But he also believes Fellten’s exotic history of electric car creation has proved there is a powerful need for just such a product.