“Carmakers' own statements to investors put electric cars at profit parity with combustion by the end of the decade, and BMW and Volvo Cars say they are already there on their newest models. Price and margin parity comes from scale.”
and
“Renault makes higher margins on its smallest electric models than on its larger ones, and Stellantis expects its ~€15,000 e-car to reach cost parity with ICEs in 2028.”
So, they aren’t only building (small) electric cars in order to meet EU emission regulations anymore.
That page also has bad news “Car CO₂ emissions are barely falling”. I think that’s mostly a matter of time, though. Even if all car and truck sales would be for fully electric vehicles, it would take decades to get rid of all ICE vehicles.
>it would take decades to get rid of all ICE vehicles
If governments were serious and fair about it, they'd just provide decent subsidies (or similar formula) to people who don't have enough money to switch, and it'd happen faster. What's going to happen though, is that many governments will just tax ICE vehicles to death (+ the cheaper chinese vehicles) while blaming you for not having enough money to switch.
Beware the the "fair". Currently, governments are taking in vast amounts through fuel taxes. That will need to be replaced. It wont be an extra fee at registration. Current politics favors use taxes. As the concept of taxing electricity going into cars is a massive cluster of issues (ie the "smart grid") the answer will likely be road pricing: a per-mile fee, which could mean manditory tracking. The transition to EVs as fair market actors is not over. It hasnt really begun.
€25,000 is still pricey. The BYD Atto 1 recently dropped to AU$19,990 in Australia, which is €12,412. I think it will be hugely popular at this price point.
Personal vehicles are atypical as a market in that a huge percentage of people buy used rather than new. So when you look at new vehicle price, you have to factor in that the top 20% (not sure about actual percentage) of people are buying new, then corporate entities are financing a huge segment, like maybe 40%, and the rest of us buy used vehicles downstream from them. €25k is barely above entry level in Europe, but it can only be afforded by most people because of this system.
Cars are just more expensive in Europe than in Australia. In Europe, cars are still a bit of a luxury, whereas in Australia, they’re an absolute necessity.
There also higher tariffs and transport cost. Shipping cars from China to the EU can cost up to a few thousand per car. Local production seems less competitive. But the bottom line is that there are now a lot of relatively affordable EVs in the market. The cheapest cars in most markets now include EVs.
For example the Dacia Spring that is selling for around 17K Euros in Germany. And then there are tax rebates, discounts, etc. that are causing some of these cars to be available for a lot less occasionally in some markets.
Markets where EVs have been available in larger numbers for a while now have a sizable EV market. Australia is relatively early with its adoption, so the second hand market is a lot smaller there. The EU as a relatively early adopter has a lot of EVs from 2020 or earlier that are still under warranty and being traded in quite large numbers now. In the last few months these been a very hot commodity as lots of people are feeling the pain of high fuel prices.
All these new small cars will become a large part of the second hand car market in a few years. There will many be millions of them on the roads in a few years. And they last quite long.
Interesting in which part of Europe are you living to make such a statement for the bit of luxury. The only country I could think of is the Netherlands and probably Belgium.
European cities are wastly more accessible as a pedestrian than australian or north american cities. And I count northern, southern, central, western and easterneuropenan cities in that.Thre other continents have some examples where the inner cities are also okayish from a pedestrian or cyclist POV, but a lot and especially suburbia is so much worse in pretty much all regions. A mining town in northern Sweden is better than suburbia on Long Island!
Outside France people don't live in big clusters. Take a look at the night satellite view. All those small/continuous towns do not have (functional) public transport. In my 12k-people town we don't have buses other than school buses and long-distance ones. And unfortunately people don't really walk other than for leisure.
As far as I know the closest city with public transport counts 100k residents, but there are 60 smaller towns in my province alone.
Yes - car is a bit of a luxury in Europe if you don't do any of those things - live in the rural parts of the country, leave the urban core, have kids, visit parents, friends and grandparents, go to your rural property, go the mountains, the beach, buy bulky things, buy things in bulk, go to any other city just for exploration and fun, go outside the city to watch the milky way, do anything spontaneous, have job in the trades or have girlfriend.
Yeah. I was recently without a car for three weeks (bangernomics finally stopped winning) and decided that I'd learned the wrong lesson about car dependency: despite living in a city with a decent bus service, I really did benefit a lot from having a car and needed to buy a secondhand one as soon as possible, even though I am waiting for my leased EV to arrive in a few months.
You have to be quite central in quite a big city to not need a car. But that does cover quite a lot of people - I would say much of the population of London and the most central bits of Manchester and Birmingham, which is easily 10-20m people.
Because i don't live in a big city (and i would dread to) the 10km commute to work is either
1) 15-25 min by car
2) 25-30 min by bike
3) 40-60 min by public transport, with at least one change
And i'm lucky as we recently moved the office to be a good 4km nearer from my home. That was further out requiring 25min by car, and aobut 1h30min by public transport with at least two changes.
Also if i want to do anything beside going in my backyard on my free time, car is a necessity.
BYD still has some work left to do then since the Volkswagen ID.Polo is 26 390 €. The ID.Polo is also considerably prettier than the Dolphin Surf, so it probably needs a bigger price cut to get customers.
My mother do not move more than 100km a day anymore (and even that is a stretch, I think the most she drive is to the beach 25 km away), but 25k€ is a very big investment. She recently bought a second hand electric car for 9k€ and is very happy with it.
There's a bit of a problem that secondhand EVs aren't on the market until a couple of years after someone has bought them new. So there's a bottleneck. In this case all the cheap leasing deals work in favor of the eventual secondhand market.
I was shocked at the thought of having to move "only" 100km a day... we are living in such different worlds. And yes I do commute, but by public transport and less than 30km away and definitely not every day.
Good looking but also a quite expensive one! If it will be for masses the prices will likely need to become substantially lower.
And we need the charging capacity for all those vehicles which is a huge issue. For example in the Netherlands this shows the capacity available to use extra power connections:
Open Autotrader -> Fiat 500e -> New -> First car: https://www.autotrader.co.uk/car-details/202506113398641 discounted to £15k. That is just a really cheap car. Even the nominal RRP £23,685 is cheap. If you want cheaper there is Dacia Spring and the cheapest BYD.
> The goals of the environmental improvements
The Netherlands of all people should understand about sea level rise and the real world capacity available to absorb CO2.
Technically yes - it is a 3-door car with two seats behind the driver. However, in my experience only small persons or kids will enjoy sitting on the rear seats. I recall that the rear seats were good as an extra space for the backpacks or shopping bags.
Weirdly enough, when these smaller two seaters show up, they are almost always overprice and getting a four seater, and just not using backseats, are a better deal. E.g. the Microlino is €20K, so why not just get the Citroen ë-C3, it's the same price, with better range?
Crash safety design features are a decent contributor to cost. I suspect manufacturers think shrinking the frame a bit, removing two doors and back seat won't drop the cost enough to convince people to buy them.
Quite a lot of Fiat 500s around me in the UK, as well as various species of Mini. But you can see the bloat even there. There's the Fiat 500X, which is a "SUV crossover" (the hilarious concept of a large small car), and the Mini Countryman.
I get that it's supposed to be a low speed city car where parking ease maybe matters more, but it's hilarious to see an EV where every newton of drag matters designed like a rounded brick on wheels. In fact most modern cars except for sedans seem to not give two shits about aero anymore which is leaving so much range on the table.
The Topolino is a type approval hack: it's an "electric quadricycle", ie legally a golf cart, and limited to 28mph in the UK and not allowed on motorways.
There's been a few of these like the Renault Twizy, and the limitations make them a gimmick that doesn't sell very well.
The charging situation need to be factored in. Charging at home, it has enough range. Public charging, range buys the likely hood of charging convenience.
Public charging infrastructure in most of Europe is exceptional[0], especially for cars like the Polo, which is a car typically used in populated areas.
Enjoy the overnight cheap electricity while it lasts. The only long-term strategy is investment in solar and batteries – use your temporary savings the government is giving you to invest in solar etc. Some governments are signalling that we have a role to play in electricity infrastructure investment...
Governments are only temporarily letting you get away with not paying the 0.35-0.80 EUR fuel duty on each litre of petrol/diesel (which then has VAT added. These taxes amount to 100s of billions a year across all of Europe). UK is steaming ahead with a per-mile tax on EVs and hybrids, for example.
It's not the 90s. Once you put it on finance, it's often cheaper than a monthly rail pass. Depending obviously on where you are and how often you travel. And also far cheaper than doing the same trip on taxis/uber even just a few days a month.
>Once you put it on finance, it's often cheaper than a monthly rail pass
Cannot this be said about anything? Choose a long enough finance and it's "cheap". Let's forget you'd be paying (at least in Europe) easily 1.6x the price of the car because of the small payments.
That said, if the EU car industry falls over completely*, there's no longer a reason for protectionist trade rules, and the EU then gets the benefit of cheaper Chinese cars.
* Short-term, Trump's tariffs and the significance of the US as an export market to several major EU producers are bad; long-term, China's actually really good at this and out-competing all western production, US and EU. Just like the chicken and egg, which comes first of "governments stop protecting the industry because the industry is important" and "the industry stops being important because the government stopped protecting it" is… well, "stop assuming all eggs have to contain chickens": there's plenty of ways either could fail independently of the other, but when it fails, the mutual support goes with it and it stays down.
I think the better news (from https://www.transportenvironment.org/articles/ev-progress-re...) is:
“Carmakers' own statements to investors put electric cars at profit parity with combustion by the end of the decade, and BMW and Volvo Cars say they are already there on their newest models. Price and margin parity comes from scale.”
and
“Renault makes higher margins on its smallest electric models than on its larger ones, and Stellantis expects its ~€15,000 e-car to reach cost parity with ICEs in 2028.”
So, they aren’t only building (small) electric cars in order to meet EU emission regulations anymore.
That page also has bad news “Car CO₂ emissions are barely falling”. I think that’s mostly a matter of time, though. Even if all car and truck sales would be for fully electric vehicles, it would take decades to get rid of all ICE vehicles.
>it would take decades to get rid of all ICE vehicles
If governments were serious and fair about it, they'd just provide decent subsidies (or similar formula) to people who don't have enough money to switch, and it'd happen faster. What's going to happen though, is that many governments will just tax ICE vehicles to death (+ the cheaper chinese vehicles) while blaming you for not having enough money to switch.
Beware the the "fair". Currently, governments are taking in vast amounts through fuel taxes. That will need to be replaced. It wont be an extra fee at registration. Current politics favors use taxes. As the concept of taxing electricity going into cars is a massive cluster of issues (ie the "smart grid") the answer will likely be road pricing: a per-mile fee, which could mean manditory tracking. The transition to EVs as fair market actors is not over. It hasnt really begun.
€25,000 is still pricey. The BYD Atto 1 recently dropped to AU$19,990 in Australia, which is €12,412. I think it will be hugely popular at this price point.
Personal vehicles are atypical as a market in that a huge percentage of people buy used rather than new. So when you look at new vehicle price, you have to factor in that the top 20% (not sure about actual percentage) of people are buying new, then corporate entities are financing a huge segment, like maybe 40%, and the rest of us buy used vehicles downstream from them. €25k is barely above entry level in Europe, but it can only be afforded by most people because of this system.
Cars are just more expensive in Europe than in Australia. In Europe, cars are still a bit of a luxury, whereas in Australia, they’re an absolute necessity.
There also higher tariffs and transport cost. Shipping cars from China to the EU can cost up to a few thousand per car. Local production seems less competitive. But the bottom line is that there are now a lot of relatively affordable EVs in the market. The cheapest cars in most markets now include EVs.
For example the Dacia Spring that is selling for around 17K Euros in Germany. And then there are tax rebates, discounts, etc. that are causing some of these cars to be available for a lot less occasionally in some markets.
Markets where EVs have been available in larger numbers for a while now have a sizable EV market. Australia is relatively early with its adoption, so the second hand market is a lot smaller there. The EU as a relatively early adopter has a lot of EVs from 2020 or earlier that are still under warranty and being traded in quite large numbers now. In the last few months these been a very hot commodity as lots of people are feeling the pain of high fuel prices.
All these new small cars will become a large part of the second hand car market in a few years. There will many be millions of them on the roads in a few years. And they last quite long.
Isn't it just different levels of import duty and/or proximity to China?
(normally something being essential drives the price up)
Jeez, cars are absolute necessity in US, and yet still ave cost new runs $50,000 US or about 44,000 euros.
I can assure you that a $50k car in the US is nowhere near 44k€ in Europe. You're lucky if it's below 54k€.
Interesting in which part of Europe are you living to make such a statement for the bit of luxury. The only country I could think of is the Netherlands and probably Belgium.
European cities are wastly more accessible as a pedestrian than australian or north american cities. And I count northern, southern, central, western and easterneuropenan cities in that.Thre other continents have some examples where the inner cities are also okayish from a pedestrian or cyclist POV, but a lot and especially suburbia is so much worse in pretty much all regions. A mining town in northern Sweden is better than suburbia on Long Island!
Outside France people don't live in big clusters. Take a look at the night satellite view. All those small/continuous towns do not have (functional) public transport. In my 12k-people town we don't have buses other than school buses and long-distance ones. And unfortunately people don't really walk other than for leisure.
As far as I know the closest city with public transport counts 100k residents, but there are 60 smaller towns in my province alone.
Yes - car is a bit of a luxury in Europe if you don't do any of those things - live in the rural parts of the country, leave the urban core, have kids, visit parents, friends and grandparents, go to your rural property, go the mountains, the beach, buy bulky things, buy things in bulk, go to any other city just for exploration and fun, go outside the city to watch the milky way, do anything spontaneous, have job in the trades or have girlfriend.
Yeah. I was recently without a car for three weeks (bangernomics finally stopped winning) and decided that I'd learned the wrong lesson about car dependency: despite living in a city with a decent bus service, I really did benefit a lot from having a car and needed to buy a secondhand one as soon as possible, even though I am waiting for my leased EV to arrive in a few months.
You have to be quite central in quite a big city to not need a car. But that does cover quite a lot of people - I would say much of the population of London and the most central bits of Manchester and Birmingham, which is easily 10-20m people.
about to say the same.
Because i don't live in a big city (and i would dread to) the 10km commute to work is either
1) 15-25 min by car
2) 25-30 min by bike
3) 40-60 min by public transport, with at least one change
And i'm lucky as we recently moved the office to be a good 4km nearer from my home. That was further out requiring 25min by car, and aobut 1h30min by public transport with at least two changes.
Also if i want to do anything beside going in my backyard on my free time, car is a necessity.
But you can walk to your neighbor 200m down the road. That feels (and actually may be) illegal on other continents.
Volkswagen Golf starts at 32 706 € here. BYD Dolphin Surf, the cheapest car BYD offers, starts at 24 590 €.
You know the old joke - I don't have to outrun the bear, need to outrun you. China's companies goal is to keep their cars 10% cheaper than the locals.
BYD still has some work left to do then since the Volkswagen ID.Polo is 26 390 €. The ID.Polo is also considerably prettier than the Dolphin Surf, so it probably needs a bigger price cut to get customers.
And further down the rung, the electric Twingo, Panda and such go toe for toe with the cheaper Chinese EVs.
Insane to think those are reasonable prices.
10 years ago, a new Renault Clio had a starting price under 14 000 €.
The Dolphin sells for about €6700-€8900 ($7500-$10.000) in China.
They see how the EU allows EU car companies to gouge their citizens and figured "eh, might as well join in on it. Pure profit."
[delayed]
I can't imagine a car selling for that price in the US. :(
My mother do not move more than 100km a day anymore (and even that is a stretch, I think the most she drive is to the beach 25 km away), but 25k€ is a very big investment. She recently bought a second hand electric car for 9k€ and is very happy with it.
New car is always a big investment, second hand is the way. 25k car will be even cheaper in few years.
There's a bit of a problem that secondhand EVs aren't on the market until a couple of years after someone has bought them new. So there's a bottleneck. In this case all the cheap leasing deals work in favor of the eventual secondhand market.
I was shocked at the thought of having to move "only" 100km a day... we are living in such different worlds. And yes I do commute, but by public transport and less than 30km away and definitely not every day.
I just want a two-seater EV. The Smart ForTwo hasn't been updated in ages and the only other ones are either quadracycles of vapourware.
Where are the runarounds for people who don't need to lug around kids or baggage?
I guess you look for the car like Fiat 500e [0]. It is a two-seater with an electric drive.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_500e
Good looking but also a quite expensive one! If it will be for masses the prices will likely need to become substantially lower.
And we need the charging capacity for all those vehicles which is a huge issue. For example in the Netherlands this shows the capacity available to use extra power connections:
https://capaciteitskaart.netbeheernederland.nl/capaciteitska...
All red. The goals of the environmental improvements should connect with the actual real world available capacity. Otherwise it's just a dream.
> quite expensive
Open Autotrader -> Fiat 500e -> New -> First car: https://www.autotrader.co.uk/car-details/202506113398641 discounted to £15k. That is just a really cheap car. Even the nominal RRP £23,685 is cheap. If you want cheaper there is Dacia Spring and the cheapest BYD.
> The goals of the environmental improvements
The Netherlands of all people should understand about sea level rise and the real world capacity available to absorb CO2.
Ah wow, they got down quite a bit already! Here it's around € 20k it seems. Not bad.
> The Netherlands of all people should understand about sea level rise and the real world capacity available to absorb CO2.
That's interesting!
The 500 has four seats and is available in 3 or 5 doors!
If you want a really small car, which Americans don't, there's the Topolino.
It's a 4 seater no? Even if the rear seats are small.
Technically yes - it is a 3-door car with two seats behind the driver. However, in my experience only small persons or kids will enjoy sitting on the rear seats. I recall that the rear seats were good as an extra space for the backpacks or shopping bags.
Weirdly enough, when these smaller two seaters show up, they are almost always overprice and getting a four seater, and just not using backseats, are a better deal. E.g. the Microlino is €20K, so why not just get the Citroen ë-C3, it's the same price, with better range?
Fiat Topolino / Citroën Ami / Honda Super-N
Honda e? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_e
Discontinued (tbh don't know why - i think it was limited run, closer to a concept car than a full production) - but a good looking little city car.
Possibly not what you're after, and possibly not available to you even then, but there is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MG_Cyberster
Crash safety design features are a decent contributor to cost. I suspect manufacturers think shrinking the frame a bit, removing two doors and back seat won't drop the cost enough to convince people to buy them.
I guess the target market is small, otherwise more options would exist.
If you buy a car anyway, might as well pay a bit more and get one that is useful in more situations.
I think battery size is also an issue.
But there are very few small gasoline cars as well, even in Europe.
Quite a lot of Fiat 500s around me in the UK, as well as various species of Mini. But you can see the bloat even there. There's the Fiat 500X, which is a "SUV crossover" (the hilarious concept of a large small car), and the Mini Countryman.
Electric Miata when?
There is the Fiat Topolino if you are ok with a pure city car.
I get that it's supposed to be a low speed city car where parking ease maybe matters more, but it's hilarious to see an EV where every newton of drag matters designed like a rounded brick on wheels. In fact most modern cars except for sedans seem to not give two shits about aero anymore which is leaving so much range on the table.
The Topolino is a type approval hack: it's an "electric quadricycle", ie legally a golf cart, and limited to 28mph in the UK and not allowed on motorways.
There's been a few of these like the Renault Twizy, and the limitations make them a gimmick that doesn't sell very well.
Smart ForTwo Has been discontinued no?
Apparently, someone heard you:
https://uk.smart.com/en/models/hashtag-two/
That's a concept car only with no intention if being in sale.
You can find a new sub 25K EUR car in Europe but the range will suck.
For example the VW Polo starts at 25K but if you want the bigger battery, its 35k.
The 25k VW ID.Polo has a range of ~300km. In Europe, that's way more than enough for >95% of trips for >95% of people.
For my commute I'd have to charge every 2-3 days in winter. Not a show stopper, but an extra 10k for more convenience is a bit much.
The charging situation need to be factored in. Charging at home, it has enough range. Public charging, range buys the likely hood of charging convenience.
Public charging infrastructure in most of Europe is exceptional[0], especially for cars like the Polo, which is a car typically used in populated areas.
https://electroverse.com/map/48.43680,5.81610,4.50/
I wouldn't say execeptional.
There are many times I tried to charge and got asked to indstall apps or the charger wasn't working. Blocked by a petrol car.
Charging in europe comes with a learning curve.
around 150km in the winter, unacceptable range for a new car. A 28kWh ioniq could do that and they are cheap and come fully loaded.
My commute is 23km one way, and the shops are even closer. I'm the 95%.
Sevenfold! Whatever happened to -fold? It's all 10X this and 5X that these days, nobody says times or fold any more
The hyphen tends to get dropped when it a word becomes more ... commonplace.
My pet peeve is all the dumbasses pronouncing "10X" as "ten ex"...
(N.B.: I'm not anti EV)
Enjoy the overnight cheap electricity while it lasts. The only long-term strategy is investment in solar and batteries – use your temporary savings the government is giving you to invest in solar etc. Some governments are signalling that we have a role to play in electricity infrastructure investment...
Governments are only temporarily letting you get away with not paying the 0.35-0.80 EUR fuel duty on each litre of petrol/diesel (which then has VAT added. These taxes amount to 100s of billions a year across all of Europe). UK is steaming ahead with a per-mile tax on EVs and hybrids, for example.
Easy to rise sevenfold when you have close to no sales at that price point due to lack of offerings
These cars are very widespread, but almost exclusively thanks to Chinese companies, and Chinese EVs are effectively banned in the US.
25k is still too fucking much.
8999 and we can start having a conversation, people can’t afford a 25k new car for gods sake.
It's not the 90s. Once you put it on finance, it's often cheaper than a monthly rail pass. Depending obviously on where you are and how often you travel. And also far cheaper than doing the same trip on taxis/uber even just a few days a month.
>Once you put it on finance, it's often cheaper than a monthly rail pass
Cannot this be said about anything? Choose a long enough finance and it's "cheap". Let's forget you'd be paying (at least in Europe) easily 1.6x the price of the car because of the small payments.
If you can't afford a new car, just buy a second hand one?
[delayed]
8999 euros that's very good cargo e-bike territory. I think that's naive to expect car in the same price range.
This is why "financing" and "second hand" exist.
That said, if the EU car industry falls over completely*, there's no longer a reason for protectionist trade rules, and the EU then gets the benefit of cheaper Chinese cars.
* Short-term, Trump's tariffs and the significance of the US as an export market to several major EU producers are bad; long-term, China's actually really good at this and out-competing all western production, US and EU. Just like the chicken and egg, which comes first of "governments stop protecting the industry because the industry is important" and "the industry stops being important because the government stopped protecting it" is… well, "stop assuming all eggs have to contain chickens": there's plenty of ways either could fail independently of the other, but when it fails, the mutual support goes with it and it stays down.