In 1981, Ing. Arjan Heinen, after having gained considerable experience in mechanical engineering, started a small company that specialized in the performance improvement of forklift trucks. These vehicles usually suffered from a limited endurance because of careless use of energy. He was generally able to double the amount of time the vehicle could be operated before the batteries needed to be changed or charged.

In the process he became more and more knowledgeable about the required systems and wound up converting cars, boats, trains and all sorts of specialized equipment with electrical components that greatly improved their efficiency. As time went by he became increasingly frustrated by the fact that he would always be one of the last subcontractors to work on the vehicle (after all the others finished their work). More often than not the project would by then already be behind schedule and the space allotted for the specified components was often smaller than originally indicated. Making do with inadequate space in difficult to reach places many a time resulted in time consuming complications and plenty of frustration. 

In one of those projects he was working on a small Automatically Guided Vehicle (AGV) to be used between the long-term parking lot of Amsterdam Airport and the terminal. He had calculated the endurance of the batteries using the stated performance of the electric motors and their gearboxes. During the actual tests, however, he fell far short of his range estimates. 

Eventually he discovered that the gearboxes of this vehicle absorbed almost half the energy and thus ruined the range (see: mechanical efficiency). To solve those two problems at once he decided in 1995 to develop a new wheel hub motor (mind you the concept dates back to 1900) that would be both easy to install and highly energy efficient.

The first TheWheel™ unit was delivered in 2001 as a generator attached to a watermill and is still producing considerable amounts of trouble free energy. In 2002 the SKF-HFO forklift truck was delivered using two TheWheel™ units. Later that same year a people mover was delivered for an amusement park. In early 2003 we decided to reorganize the companies and rename them “e-Traction®”. Around the same we received the go-ahead on “The Whisper”. 

At the time of this writing, testing of the Whisper™, but also the “e-Traction® Bus” for which many of the innovations were first developed, is progressing with impressive results. Both these buses are incidentally wholly owned by the company.