Price range?
Price range: less than half a mill. The cheapest one I’ve seen so far was 350k (and it was in Gauteng and had high mileage). The one I looked at on Saturday is 395k.
It is a sh*tload of money for a car that has an 100km range. But having experienced it, and with the help of the bank… maybe?
Once you go to around 550k, you can get very decent options.
If money is not a problem for you, I’d say get the 2017 and later models that has the 30kWh battery.
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That’s why I asked, for city driving.
Yet when I do the sums on the back of a cigarette box, sorry, on a vape device to be PC, keeping Suzy with repairs/maintenance and diesel costs … license too … the purchase price may be justified over the next “100” years to keep Suzy going.
The interest, however… I’ll be dood and dead by the time Suzy can cost all of that!
So sadly, I must decline. 
Oh there is absolutely no way this makes ANY financial sense. Just the opportunity cost on 400k (if you stick that in your homeloan) is around R3300 a month, which is about the combined fuel cost of our two cars. Add devaluation, insurance, and it is most certainly going to cost more. But again, these are the things you say to yourself BEFORE you take the test drive.
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But…
- Electricity is cheap
- Electricity is plentiful, 80%+ is hydro.
- State subsidies for going EV
- Taxes on ICE sales.
It isn’t really a surprise is it? What is also not a surprise is that other countries don’t do the same… South Africa has ZERO of the above 4 for example.
Hey, our electricity is cheap! And we have taxes on ICE sales. 
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ORA in SA.
Cheap 
really….
DuurkoopGroetnis
Yup, I saw it. It beats the mini out by a mere 25k. Or 3%. But it does have double the range, and it uses LiFePO4 batteries. So I don’t think it is bad value for money (the opposite actually), but it is not the the car that’s going to make EVs mainstream. Not yet.
Sadly for those of us that have been watching the EV space in SA for years, it doesn’t really feel cheaper than the Mini, because I remember when the Mini launched in SA it was selling for R655k.
But I do agree, it’s better than nothing, but if GWM really wanted to sell EV’s like hotcakes strip the Ora down:
- No need for that fancy dual 10" displays
- Drop the leatherett, i’ll happily sit on cloth seats
- No need for fancy software auto braking, lane keeping assist etc (My wife already tells me how to drive
) - Drop the battery size to 32kWh (Should still be able to do ±200km)
That’s how you get to a everyday usable EV for R400k - R500k.
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I really enjoyed this article! The make an excellent point or three.
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As the battery is 40% to 50% of the total vehicle cost, this one change could bring it into reach for many people.
This is actually the one least likely to happen, simply because the cost of two build options on your production line might be more than just plopping the same screens in your base model.
A similar thing happened as laws started to mandate reverse cameras. If the car stereo already has an LCD screen, this is easy, but what if the base model doesn’t have a radio (like in the 90s and early 2000s)? Then you need a second build option, wiring harnesses, etc… cheaper to just give everyone the same radio, and if you must, then put cheaper/less speakers in the base model (reserve the JBL and Harman Kardon for the fancier models).
This has got to be the weirdest thing I’ve experienced. I drove a fairly new VW Passat when I was in Europe. It has lane-keep assist. Some of the regional roads has an interesting thing where one lane diverts a little to the right at times (probably a “traffic calming” thing) with an island in the middle. My normal driving style for this is what you might call a “racing line”, sitting as far right in the lane as possible to get more of a straight line through the twist. Except, lane assist won’t let you do that. It literally grabs the wheel and drives you through there in the middle 
So shiny, I had to obscure a third face in the reflection (plus those of my kids). This is the cheapest second-hand EV in Cape Town at the moment. The previous owner had leather-seats custom installed.
My only worry about this one: The battery Kappa shows 13.8kWh (out of an original 18.8kWh), 72% SOC, and an estimated range of 70km. Now as I always tell myself… this is an estimate. This BMS (like all others) suffer from drift, and it only really resets that number if you drain the battery almost completely and then fully recharge it (so it can recalibrate). So it MIGHT be better than this, and it probably IS better than this, but still, less than 80% retained capacity does not fill me with happiness.
It’s also the EV with the highest battery replacement cost. You can replace individual modules, but they are around 40k each.
I should probably wait another year…
SoH estimate on NMC is probably on the optimistic side if not “recalibrated” by a full cycle (IMHO).
Could be, except from what I’ve read the estimate is deliberately pessimistic and a full charge (or even a firmware update!) will show better numbers. The only real way to know the capacity is for a workshop to do a full charge/discharge (which is essentially the same as driving it until it dies, and counting how many kWh it slurps up afterwards).
The estimate also varies by as much as 3kWh (over 10%!) depending on things like the current temperature. In other words, it’s meaningless… except the previous i3 I looked at (which sold in 4 days) had a much better number (15.2kWh), had 20 000km more on it, and was driven by a student (the dirty seats more or less reflected the attitude towards the vehicle).
Anyway, sales guy will fully recharge it and then next weekend we’ll look again.
But man, what a cheeky little vehicle. Literally the first car my wife fell in love with almost immediately.
Right. So load-shedding intervened (that’s prophetic isn’t it!) and when I got there the car had about an 82% SOC. I was handed the keys and told to get going, so I spent the next 45 minutes racking up a mixture of highway and city driving amounting to around 25km.
I drove the car like a normal human being, not like a bat out of hell, and not like a granny. I started with a 62km range estimate, and came back (25km later) with a 58km range estimate. The other test drivers likely drove the car in a more “fun” manner, which should explain the rapidly improving estimate.
The aircon was off, as it is a cool day in Cape Town, and the original maximum range number was also sans-aircon, so as a comparative test that’s what you want to do.
After 25km, I returned with a 57% SOC. So about 1% per km, which (naively and simplistically) puts the estimated range remaining in this battery at 100km, vs the original 130km estimate. That’s somewhat better than the capacity estimate of the car.
I redid the capacity check (in the cluster) twice, before leaving (14.2kWh) and after returning (14.3kWh), vs the 13.8kWh of last week. Confirming that it varies a lot, depending on temperature and how you treat it.
In any case, I am probably going to pull the trigger and buy this car.
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@TheTerribleTriplet will offer to top balance all the cells and also install a Neeeheeeyyy Active balancer (OK 3-4 of them). It probably has LED lights so he will install a “traditional bulb” or 4 so you can speed up the discharge of any high cells. With some sort of small relay and a switch on the dash.
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Sorry, but I’m not letting @TheTerribleTriplet (with his smoke-letting capacities) near this thing!
This will be my second stint at BMW ownerage. The previous time, it was a disaster. It was an E46 (which in BMW years is like a million years ago), but everything that goes wrong on an E46 went wrong on that car. Spurious tail light warnings due to a bad ground? Check. Failing window regulator? Check. Failing fan speed control module (aka hedgehog resistor), check and check (it failed twice in a year). Even had a broken window washer. Never in all my years of car ownership have I ever had a failed window washer. That stuff is way too boring and reliable on other cars!
I decided to get rid of it before something really expensive breaks.
This time, the list of things that goes wrong is impressively short. Engine mount (if you drive like a hooligan), and aircon compressor, and even these don’t appear to be as common as the E46’s well-attested list.