Etox: an electric sports car, twenty years early

Ertex developed Etox in 2004 as one of Turkey's first sports car projects — an attempt to show what the group's design and production capability could do on an original platform rather than on a converted one.

The government subsequently funded a programme of more than two million US dollars to redevelop the car as an electric vehicle, and Ertex delivered it in partnership with Middle East Technical University. The result, in 2006, was Turkey's first locally developed concept BEV.

Series production was never started. There was effectively no charging infrastructure in the country at the time, and the honest reading of the market was that it was not ready. The engineering knowledge stayed inside the company — which is why a fully electric platform like the Mercedes VLE is familiar ground rather than a new departure.