GM is launching a $5K tiny electric car in China made for city commuters
dailymail.co.uk
dailymail.co.uk
In more recent news, China may allow foreign automakers to set up EV brands/manufacturing without having a local Joint Venture Partner.
Currently, all outside automakers (GM, BMW, Volkswagen, Toyota, etc, etc) must have a Chinese partner with at least a 50% stake.
It will be interesting to see if this comes to pass, and how the foreign firms play it: ie, will GM choose Buick or Cadillac to be the EV brand in China?
Disclaimer: I work for GM, but not on anything related to China.
"By the end of 2020, the company will be selling 10 new electric vehicles. Barra commented:"
“By 2025, nearly all models from GM’s global brands in China – Buick, Cadillac and Chevrolet – will offer electrification technology. To support GM’s growing NEV fleet planned for China; its SAIC-GM joint venture is opening a new battery assembly plant in Shanghai this year.”
I think non-Chinese governments should start fighting back on this. It's kinda messed up that Chinese companies can do unlimited business in the U.S. and Europe but then when we have a business that might sell to China, they take more than half the profits.
Everyone wants a piece of the presumed cash cow of the huge moderately untapped market of China.
China can dictate the access to this market.
US cannot do the opposite, where would the US consumer find many made in china electronics and other items for cheap.. china is already entrenched in western markets
Disclaimer: I know nothing about international trade policy.
.. and in the 20th century [0] to protect the US automobile industry from fuel efficient Japanese imports.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_export_restraints
This is not really true in the UK case. While protectionist policies certainly did exist on agricultural goods in the 18th century, the UK moved gradually towards free trade throughout most of the early 19th century - and then embraced it completely with the repeal of the corn laws in 1846.
In fact, the UK at that time had a policy of unilateral free trade - not imposing tariffs on imported goods even when they came from countries who imposed tariffs on British goods.
This did become a problem during wartime. By 1914, the UK was heavily dependent on imported food and a large part of the German strategy was to try to sink ships bringing food to Britain.
The one area where tariffs were still applied was on luxury goods, which were seen to have low price elasticity. (Compare to modern China, which also seeks tariff-free trade on commodities, resources, agricultural products, etc - but heavily taxes luxuries)
It wasn't until the 1930s that there was a serious swing back towards protectionism in the UK.
The UK also, as you mentioned prevented their colonies and countries in their sphere of influence from instituting similar protectionist laws to develop their own industry. Instead there was a role designed for them, namely to provide cheap raw materials.
The US did the same after attaining a similar position as the world superpower later.
It will do anything possible to expand manufacture base, use all necessary means to acquire, absolve, develop, own technology/market.
US government/society has diverse conflicting interested.
* Walmart wants import.
* Consumers wants cheaper goods.
* Defense industry wants war.
* Biz want less regulation.
* Environmentalists wants less/no pollution.
* Other groups want more/less spending/tax on their own pet issue/projects.China (and India) have all the right and incentives to protect their continents from bad economic influences.
This is less true than naive abalysis suggests, because relative deprivation is a significant source of disutility and trade that is “mutually beneficial” before the effects of relative deprivation are considered is often so unequal inn benefit distribution that the total net utility on one side is negative.
Classical comparative advantage arguments for trade tend to ignore the disutility from relative deprivation.
That's one of many places where it occurs, yes (it also happens locally.) Trade can exacerbate it, because even superficially mutually beneficial trade doesn't advance the wealth on both sides equally, and the degree of difference in material position, not merely it's binary existence or not, is a key factor in the magnitude of the resulting disutility.
I suppose this is a matter of judgement though and not an objective fact so to each their own.
That's a nice strawman you've set up, but no one in the discussion actually claimed that.
I think they can take care of themselves now and follow trade policies which are fair.
To your point, it's not necessary or beneficial (in general) for US or Europe to act similarly. Western industries are highly developed and specialized, such regulations hurt consumers in order to prop up industry. So sure, if you want your manufacturing and textile jobs to stay in your country then you can have such regulations, but the cost of that is everyone in your country pays +X% more (in value, e.g. higher price or lower quality) for textiles and manufactured goods, which is what the Chinese consumer is doing right now for cars and every other highly regulated import good.
edit: By "flag" I mean "highlight them on the client side". Not talking about writing code to automatically downvote or report things.
100 miles would be enough to get me to work and back the whole week, I could charge at the company and buying groceries would be fine with this size of car, too.
Totally reminds me of my smart, which was basically the same size and also this cheap. Buying an electric smart sets you back 21k € and you have to rent the battery on top (65 € per month), so it´s no real option...
That said, this new EV in the same form factor as the Smart, at that insanely low price, is a no-brainer for city commutes and perhaps even for suburban/semi-rural. I know I could easily get a week's worth of daily driving out of it, and like you, my company would allow me to charge at work. While we would definitely take the traditional sedan on any long trips or vacations, local trips would be fun and practical in a little EV.
Unfortunately, just like the Smart, it would be horribly overpriced if it ever came Stateside.
Which is why SUV's are so profitable as their markup relates to perception not cost.
I'd toyed with the idea of buying one when they first became available. But the fuel efficiency wasn't as good as some other contemporary vehicle models. And I'd be giving up a whole back seat. And performance was certainly anemic, even by sub-compact car standards.
I'll probably just get a Prius next year. 50 mpg, as actually measured by outside firms like Consumer Reports. That's so impressive. I'd love to get an electric, but they're just too expensive still.
One would think a modern plug-in hybrid would get well over 70 mpg.
A 2017 Prius has 58 city mpg.
You can beat that with an efficient driving style. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy-efficient_driving
So, they really are significantly better.
1991 Honda Civic highway: 47 mpg
2017 Prius highway: 53 mpg
At steady highway speeds you gain nothing and need to haul extra weight. Which is why long haul trucks are not all hybrids right now.
So, yes it's not a pure net gain without costs. But, I assume most people can make that prediction fairly accurately.
The weight penalty isn't as bad as you might imagine. On the Toyotas, the hybrid design replaces the regular transmission, flywheel, and torque converter (if automatic) or clutch (if manual).
So the big weight penalty is mostly the battery pack.
A good example of this is the Mazda MX-5. The original model from 1989 weighed 940 kg (2,070 lb). In 2009 Mazda made a special lightweight MX-5 to celebrate the 20th anniversary. It was made of special materials and even removed the windshield to save weight. The resulting car weighed 130 lbs more than the 1989 model.
Including the electricity usage, or without it? Because my old 2013 Volt gets a real-world 150 mpg, if you don't count the electricity.
But if you run it on gas alone, it only gets ~40mpg. Largely because, adding 1,000+ pounds of battery means the car will always be way heavier than a "lightweight body" 1991 subcompact.
That's surprising. How could this be the case given the size?
As a young driver you have to pay premium charges to the insurance companies, like five to six times of the normal price if you are an unexperienced driver. Cars which are "unpopular" (especially with young people) are also cheaper...
Due to the small engine, taxes are also very low for smarts.
All in all this made up for the rather high gas use...
I was surprised that their mileage was so low. Some sources point at values close to 60mpg but somehow US-based estimates nearly halve those values.
It's very weird, or even unbelievable, how a 2-seat 730kg car with a 0.6l engine is shown has having worse mileage than a 5-seat 1100kg car with a 1.5l engine. Things don't add up.
http://e-go-mobile.com/en/models/e.go-life/
It starts from EUR 15900 (or EUR 11900 if you discount the federal "E-Prämie") and production will start next year. (Disclaimer: I'm indirectly affiliated with e.Go)
I mean, you can buy used Renault Zoe models for around 10k Euro. Even if you have to rent the battery, you can probably pay 100 months of battery rent with the price difference...
From my expectation, electric cars should just be cheaper as the whole engine system is so much cheaper.
But yeah, batteries are not yet cheap at all and there are lots of development costs and so on...
I´m really looking forward to cheap electric vehicles, those will be such great times. :-D
My concern with any car that small is crash safety. Just not room for any kind of significant crumple zone.
The plastic obviously crashes but also absorbs energy just like some shock elements which every smart has...
After all it´s a very safe car.
http://www.chinamobil.ru/eng/saic/baojun/e100/?view=props
If that's correct, then it starts at 93,900CNY which is currently a bit over $14,000.
Still quite cheap (the Smart ED, which I believe is the cheapest EV you can buy in the US at the moment, is $26,000) but not nearly as cheap as the title implies.
China has cars for 4.000 USD that don't make the American market, many built in the same factory (we have lots of those here in Uruguay).
But what is coming is a wave of EV in China, that might be around $1000.
How much does it cost to personally transport a car across the pacific ocean to the westcoast of the US/Canada? I've heard of people doing that for nice Japanese import cars.
Otherwise I could see plenty of these cars showing up in South East Asia or Russia. But then again, it will still have to find a market with a few thousand markup (to make flipping them worth it) which will likely have plenty of competition from gas cars...
It's expensive.
Import duties, plus having to go through the hassle of compliance with US vehicle standards.
At your own peril, you may chose to ignore either or both of these, with the risk of:
Jail, punitive fines, confiscation of your illegally imported vehicle, and basically be on every federal criminal importation watch list imaginable.
I wonder would it be restricted to sell to China citizens only - it wouldn't help though.
Certainly a higher error tolerance and lower risk of fatality as compared to a 5000 lb Tesla that goes to 0-60 in 2.4 seconds and takes a football field and a half to slow down.
Maybe they should just make all self-driving cars weigh 1500 lbs and top out at 45 mph. Not a big deal when they run into each other, like bumper cars.
I think collisions below 40 mph are quite survivable if they're not two-way head on/overlap and the cars are below a certain weight and designed to bounce against each other.
They just need to make every autonomous car on the road 1500-2000lb and install rubber bumpers. The neural net will figure it out itself after a few million real world collisions and daily commutes will gradually become less jarring and eventful.
[0] Slight exaggeration.
Japanese cars don't depreciate as much as other cars, in general, but the Nissan Leaf has terrible resale value. So do some of the other all-electric cars, like the Fiat 500e. I suspect the prospective buyers are worried about the battery going bad or losing capacity over time. That would be very expensive to fix without a warranty.
The primary maintenance cost for the EV is the battery, and battery warranties are pretty generous to decrease people's anxiety about them.
https://www.sdge.com/clean-energy/electric-vehicles/10000-me...
https://cleantechnica.com/2016/12/15/get-new-nissan-leaf-low...
One of the things you may find unpalatable is how they hold up in crash tests. That is, they don't or they don't do it very well. At those price points, safety is truly optional.
Let's compare the Renault Kwid that was tested in March 2016, and a newer Renault Kwid III with a driver-side airbag that was tested a month later.
* Renault Kwid I: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3Xiw-xP3HA
* Renault Kwid III: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi1LgUrd5fI
The newer Kwid certainly didn't have _complete structural cabin failure_, but forces experienced and expected injuries still resulted in 0-stars for front occupants. You get what you pay for.
Here's an Indian news story (cheap car safety was a hot button issue in 2016) that included an interim revision of the Kwid (the Kwid II, amongst other current cars failing crash tests) which fared better structurally, but had the driver basically eat the steering wheel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qqbQZBmxyE Renault isn't some scrappy upstart either -- they know how to engineer very safe cars, but they (as does sister company Nissan, as well as Hyundai and VW) sometimes make some pretty sketchy stuff for emerging markets.
There is no comparison with markets like India and Brazil, which have far weaker crash safety standards.
I suspect by 2020 cars like the Renault Kwid will mostly be a thing of the past in India as well, and poor vehicle safety is also becoming an increasingly contentious issue in Brazil.
Not yet shipping, of course...
Totally off topic, but I keep being surprised by how ridiculously rich the average HN'er appears to be. You talk about buying cars like they're Mars bars. :-)
Or you could buy 2-3 20 year old Civics/Camrys, use one as the primary and cannibalise parts from the others to keep it going
To add to that, $5K might work in southern states, but I haven't had much luck finding something relatively new for $5K that didn't have serious rust issues as well.
Source: BTDT
Buy 2004 Camrys? Or spend that $5k on a decent single car instead…
I don't buy into the parts car idea, myself. Although any e.g. Honda from the same model year will share a large number of parts with any other Honda, they will still be old and worn out. New parts are readily available for most older cars if you stick with mainstream models that were sold in large numbers.
If you need something significant like a transmission, you can always get one from a salvage company.
You nailed the problem, the same parts fail on all of them. But I've also gained my money's worth of car knowledge, which is more valuable to me than a banker collecting interest :)
That probably works better if you don't put a value on your own time and have the tools and facilities to do heavy repair, I think most people would be better off buying a better car than trying to transfer parts from the donor car(s) to their commute car. Assuming they even have a place to park the donor car.
In SV monopoly money $10k is dirt. Everywhere else it's a major expense.
I'm exaggerating but you get the point.
Selling "unsafe" cars may actually save lives.
It's interesting how there seems to be no demand, or at least no supply, for vehicles like this in US/Canada. This would be the perfect commuter vehicle for our family.
What about this is not a traditional automobile? It's kinda small, but what "rule" "restricts" you from treating it as an automobile? It's basically an electric smart car.
Just one example, because of the Chicken Tax there is a 25% tariff on light trucks.
These laws extend not just to autos and auto parts, but to things like cheese, shoes, etc.
Because of that + IIHS safety requirements, you see the 4-star Aus. ANCAP rated Hiace's commonly all over the world, except in the USA.
Honestly, I would be pretty interested in if someone has estimated lives saved over cost Of safety features in vehicles. One example might be b/w the likes of a Hiace and an NV cargo van, or a Tacoma vs a Hilux. Divide that by cost across industry adoption of higher safety standards and see what it is per life or limb saved. I would imagine it is a relatively high, expensive fruit on the tree of saving lives.
Either way: nothing about this is a model 3 competitor. They're in entirely different segments.
I'd blame the demand on Europe's higher population density and better public transit - there's not nearly as much "need" (demand?) for vehicles that can make long, sustained trips.
It’s only real downside is that luggage space is very limited.
But equally can't overlook the government incentives offered in many European countries and those have been IMHO pretty aggressive, making EV's a very tempting option for consumers.
Though, gas/petrol/diesel is more expensive in Europe and does not have the governmental subsidies many other countries offer and is equally very taxed. Again making EV's, very much cost effective for so many. Some places even offer free charging, if not subsidised charging.
So factoring is the demand for smaller vehicles needing to go shorter distances and those incentives/subsidies, then you can see why EV's in Europe garnering much traction.
I almost forgot congestion charges, EV's avoid those and they can add up in some cities/area's (thinking London for example).
Might be a factor but take a look on the streets of Munich and you'll see a lot of what I call "street-legal tanks"...
They're about status. Plenty of people want something small and cheap, and in London EVs don't pay congestion charge, so the incentive is even higher. But that said, if you're an obnoxious commodities trader who just spent £10m on that new place just off the King's Road, you're probably going to buy your wife an X5 to keep the kids safe...
They just have them as a status symbol because they want to feel important/powerful/rich.
One big difference is car infrastructure, mostly parking: in many European settlements, from most capitals to the smallest village, an unnecessarily big car is a serious inconvenience. Whereas in the US, even on Manhattan a smaller car won't improve the driving (and parking) experience a lot as everything is built to accommodate big cars, just not in unlimited quantity.
This does not keep most Europeans from theoretically desiring a big car, but it makes not spending on one so much more bearable. The narrow streets use-case makes small cars common enough to make them non-exotic, non-stigmatizing also where streets are wide and parking is one size fits all.
I drive a pretty small car, but I don't think I would get one of these, either. If I got t-boned by a Chevy Tahoe, there would be no chance of survival.
The problem now being that "$5k" isn't very disruptive in the moped segment of commuter vehicles.
I talked to an owner once, who was towing a trailer. With the trailer he was only getting 50mpg, normally ~70.
Unfortunately, they have had major delays and funding issues. Their vehicle is an 84MPG diesel not an EV, but I wonder if an EV producer would consider a similar strategy.
[1] http://tangland.en.made-in-china.com/product/yjvxaLOlrrkS/Ch...
But of course, it is not available in NA and if it were somehow I doubt the price would remain $5k (which is roughly the same as a good carbon fiber road bike).
Yikes.
If you aren't optimizing for many other factors already the amount of weight loss from the lighter frame will have a minimal effect.
I commute on cheap mountain bike. Too many potholes and obstacles, etc for any road bike with 23mm tires. It would get destroyed on first ride to the city core.
$7000 is after taxes, and tarifs, with no subsidies
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Trends/Next-big-battle-in-C...
Goodbye petroleum age.
[0] http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/07/autos/gm-china-electric-car/...
Sorry for the sidetrack, but this comment struck me as odd. perhaps it was just a poor choice of words. FWIW, the last thing I thought I'd ever do was defend the Daily Mail. While I fundamentally disagree with the Daily Mail's politics and abhor their celebrity obsession, it is a 121 year-old newspaper with the second highest circulation in the UK. I haven't heard their reputation questioned before. No more than any other news source, that is.
Insidious companies can continue existing for a long time.
[edit]: After doing a bit more digging, it also turns out that CNN Money often publishes companies' press releases almost verbatim. Oops.
Wait that article is from more than a month ago, and so is the daily mail article. Why is this being posted now?
Daily Mail may not be the Wall Street Journal, but in many cases I have found it serviceable, and in HN's case it is often just necessary for it to catalyze discussion on the topic.
Perhaps go and find a better source for us, link it, and flag it for a mod to consider swapping the article in the parent.
[0] https://twitter.com/moranicly/status/908710539500642304
[1] https://leftfootforward.org/2015/05/daily-mails-racial-scare...
Here is an alternate source https://carnewschina.com/2017/08/08/meet-gms-cheapest-electr...
> As Tesla prepares to launch its 'affordable' Model 3 at $35,000, General Motors just unveiled a tiny electric car that costs only $5,000.
Then later on:
> The $5,300 cost is after local and national subsidies.
I really don't understand who the hyper-cheap vehicle market in America is aimed towards. If you have less than $8k to spend on a mode of transportation, there are plenty of used beaters available. Repurposing an existing car will also make it more environmentally friendly than a brand new device.
Used cars in the USA are tricky: you have a severe chance of getting a lemon with no decent warranty. Also, financing is much guarded on used than new. In Japan, they make cars over 5 years old prohibitively expensive to maintain. In China....well....you really can't trust anything used, they have ways of dressing up a total to look completely undamaged and even new.
The car in the article is being released in China, which is a somewhat different country than America.
And the Smart that you open with complaints about is neither germane to the article nor a hypercheap, sub-$8K car in America (it's actually more expensive than a number of larger, heavily-selling subcompacts); it's small even for a subcompact, which can be a selling point for some buyers (if you are garaging it in an urban environment where space is at a premium, the value of the square footage freed for other purposes can be quite high compared to other cars.)
The previous generation fortwo was certainly a very unpleasant ride. Shifting would take literally seconds, uncomfortable suspension, and a not good entertainment system which would freeze up regularly.
car2go however has been replacing their legacy fleet with the new generation fortwo which is an amazing change. I find that the new cars are quite good to drive - all of my gripes from the last model are solved. I cringe on the days that I have to drive the old model, but the current one is great.
Even better are the Mercedes CLA and GLA that car2go now offers but sometimes the nimbleness and size of the fortwo is hard to pass up :)
Overall though I can say that the current fortwo model is an order of magnitude better than the last and it's certainly worth trying out if you were put off by the last.
Huh. Who would have guessed?
How do you know that it doesn't have comparable safety features to a smart car? Or that the manufacturer's workforce doesn't have comparably good pay and benefits? None of these claims about the company and the car is in the article or publicly available to anyone - I looked.
What is your motivation here?
Also, it's not uncommon to see people driving jury-rigged tricycles in the boonies.
China is not a place I associate with high safety standards.
Good work defending implicit nationalism with nonsense.
Have you ever been to the city limits of Mobile, Alabama? The place stinks of ammonia. Based on this experience, America is not a place I associate with any safety standards.
See how that works?
I can speak at length about things I have seen in China. I still love China, but it's not above criticism.
Let's stay on track here - this isn't about your irrelevant experiences traveling in China. Trolls use exactly this tactic to waste the time of dubious readers, in an apparent attempt to shift the burden of proof to anybody that’d bother. I'm not going to disprove every vague, unrelated anecdote you're willing to share.
I don’t know where you hail from, but as an anglo-American citizen, let me be clear: this jingoistic willingness to support bullshit about American manufacturing in China makes the USA look pathetic and fearful about the rise of competitors. It is feckless to encourage English readers on HN with nonsense - the net effect is to stir readers into underestimating the vast safety engineering talent in China.
That factor of 2 is the same as a programmer in Silicon Valley. [2]
Who's the one getting underpaid?
[1] http://www.thayer-consulting.com/blog/2016/05/04/how-and-how...
[2] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-minimum-salary-needed-to-l...