But not one of these… I bought an inexpensive electric pickup truck from China (and learned a lot) 
I think if you are not Chinese you should look at buy the EV Cabrio. Then at least you will be able to see over the windscreen and not have to hang out the door to drive
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Net so ja, perfect for our market.
I think there is a reason for that. Currently they are targeting the luxury end of the market, and for good reason as well: That’s usually where you find the early adopters. You cannot sell a luxury car with no proper range, and since you’re targeting the high-end money as well, you might as well throw in a large battery.
This is however precisely what keeps me out of the EV market. I buy cars like I buy steel… by the kilogram, if possible. Not really, but that’s about the gist of it. I’d rather spend money on a nice house than on a nice car, even if I have some basic standards for the cars I drive (utterly reliable, must at least have alloys!). I’m going to buy an EV when it starts making financial sense, in other words, when it doesn’t cost extra money to own one (right now it still does).
One of the easiest ways to bring such a car into my reach is to make the battery smaller, because that is also the most expensive part of an electric vehicle. Given that even the fanciest EV cannot do the distances I need to cover at times, I am always going to keep an ICE-vehicle anyway, so stop trying to replace that car. Give me a replacement for the short trips… then we can talk…
In time, we will probably get there. We do already have the Eleksa Citybug. It’s the G-EEC from China, and it costs 6000 USD (about 100k), but after imports, taxes, and whatever else, it costs 230k. Still feels a little too much. At 150k, it might become an option.
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Between Tax and Import duties we have 40% + on the car. Add shipping, local approvals etc etc and we can easily see the price going to nowhere fast. let alone the local importer distributer adding 30-70% margin after wholesale discount.
Overseas, excluding China, the shorter range cars don’t really sell well at all. Call that whatever you like, range anxiety or not reliable or kak looking or whatever. For sure they have, for the Whuling mini, almost 0 safety like no airbags etc. with the others not that far behind from a safety aspect.
Fogettaboutit getting a cheap EV in SA anytime soon. BYD been in Zim now for years and other countries on the continent as well. Other brands are available too, but almost nada in SA and nobody sells em in volume. Everybody wants one, but nope you cannot get one.
ICE sales have already started declining rapidly. Not many years left for the production to become non viable due to no more profits. Many OEM’s have announced or have already dropped entry level models as was mentioned. This trend is on the downhill.
Groetnis
Diess lost the job due to the unions in Germany, some board members are union men. They did not like one bit the suggestion by Diess that VW is 3 or 4 times less productive than Tesla, that may have been the truth but ultimately the unions depend on members in numbers to get paid and to have political clout.
There are many other things, Diess made some enemies and the after Dieselgate thing also was not helping.
Groetnis
Tesla, dangerous cars man … dangerous … no seriously, watch the end … WOW!
It says “drive thru”, but you’re supposed to drive around.
Also:
nobody was wounded, and there were no major injuries to the driver
Sounds pretty safe to me!
CARIAD or as some say, cardiac arrest. About 7K people and the software dev is 3 years behind already. So Porsche got mad and said they want a different version, like a V2.5 rather than V3.0 that Cariad was busy with and taking way to long. So now a lot of staff was given this target and guess what, most all the crap of V3 got eventually added to V2.5…
So now half the staff work on 2 projects and it’s all out of control. Like cowboys herding cats…
Groetnis
He must have pressed the Tubo-boost button…
On this topic check out how a F1 car gets scary when it’s upside down. (gives me the grills!)
