Serbian electric car for global market - Pharaoh starts production of electric vehicles in 2015

Serbia's Pharaoh will unveil a prototype of a zero-emission electric car in late 2013. The company has also announced that the production in Serbia will commence in 2015.

- We plan to open a car assembly plant in Serbia in 2015. In its fifth year of operations, it will be making 40,000 vehicles for the EU and China, as well as for South Korea and Japan - Vuk Stefanovic, director of the company Pharaoh Electric Vehicle Corporation, said at a conference in the Belgrade Chamber of Commerce.

Within five years of the start of the production, over 1,000 people will be employed at the car assembly plant and another 8,000 people will get a job at the company's supply chain.

He stressed that the plan was also to open a 10,000-square-meter plant in Serbia to process raw materials for the production of cars in addition to aforementioned car assembly plant.

The electric car will be made of composite materials, and designers from Brazil have already been hired to design its look.

- The company's idea is to produce composite materials for electric cars in a plant in Serbia. These materials are already available in Serbia. They are made from a volcanic rock that needs to be melted and then weaved in the way to create a fabric for composites, which become a serious material when mixed with resin. Composites are lighter and safer material than steel and aluminum, and it will also make cars look prettier - Stefanovic said in a talk with eKapija.

A proof that this is a very ambitious project is the company's plan to become the world's leading manufacturer of electric vehicles and sell million cars a year until 2025.

- Our competitors are not large car makers such as Mercedes or Toyota, but companies like Tesla Motors, since it is an innovative company that produces zero-emission vehicles, which is also our goal – Stefanovic pointed out.

The CEO of Pharaoh also announced the opening of a plant in China in 2017, which should be making 100,000 vehicles a year as of 2022. He also mentioned a possibility of taking the company public in the period 2018-2020 if the business climate was favorable, but he also said that it was too early to speak about that.

Stefanovic did not want to specify the value of this investment, pointing out it was too early to speak about that as well.

- In the first phase of the project, which is not as big as the second phase, we are talking with institutions and individuals from the country and abroad. The investment for the initial phase is not that big, while the investment for the second phase is huge. We have already developed a business plan, but we do not want to talk about details at the moment - Stefanovic said to our web portal.

As he told us, the price of the electric vehicle should not exceed the price of a regular car because the price of batteries in 2015, when Pharaoh's launches its first electric vehicle, will be much lower than today.

Suzana Obradovic