It starts with the N-Van, a van unique in that it has no B-pillar on the passenger side. Imagine flinging open the front door and sliding it to find a massive opening the size of a storefront window, with the limits of what you can load through it being more creative than physical. Why not hang an awning, pack a pit bike, or take a flying leap into your vehicle? Oh, and if you want to carry passengers and cargo, check out the incredible array of folding seats. Marvelous, isn’t it? Then again, form factor is just one reason the N-Van EV holds such great promise. In Japan, commercial-spec kei vans are often used for last-mile deliveries, exactly the sort of duty cycle best suited to EVs. Frequent stops maximize the benefits of regenerative braking, urban speeds keep energy consumption low, and the lack of tailpipe emissions will likely do some good in congested environments. While Honda says to expect a 124-mile range out of this little electric van, I wouldn’t be surprised if some feather-footed delivery drivers manage to occasionally beat the estimate. Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the N-Van EV is its purported price tag. Honda claims that when this thing launches in the spring of 2024, it’ll start in the one million yen range, as Honda’s targeting price parity with gasoline-powered models. That’s right, a cheap EV with price parity to gasoline-powered equivalents. A regular base-model N-Van starts at 1,160,000 yen before consumption tax, or just under $8,500 at current conversion rates, so if Honda can land in that ballpark, it would be an amazing feat. For context, the only comparable electric kei van, the Mitsuishi Minicab MIEV, costs a whopping 2,431,000 yen, or around $17,777. Still very cheap as far as cars go, but nowhere near what Honda claims the electric N-Van will cost. Plus, the Mitsubishi is based on a design from 1999, while the Honda’s design debuted in 2018. While there are obvious reasons why we won’t get cheap electric kei vans in America such as crash test regulations, there’s a real market for cheap EVs that don’t even need to pack a ton of range. See, many members of the public know that EVs aren’t as practical as gasoline-powered vehicles for long trips, so cheap EVs will likely be second cars in two-car households. In addition to augmenting gasoline-powered cars, Wards Auto found that young people are more inclined towards EV ownership but don’t have the same disposable income as older generations, so cheap EVs would be a great opportunity to pick up some new customers. Sure, the Chevrolet Bolt is attracting a ton of attention now that it’s cheap, but we can go even cheaper. Remember when car manufacturers were eager to brag about how little they could sell cars for? All the Escort Ponys and Dodge Omni Americas you could shake a stick at. Give the public 100 miles of range for a price tag close to $20,000 and watch them eat it up, especially since the days of free financing are essentially gone. Nissan has already proven that cheap EVs can do well in Japan with the sold-out Sakura, so why can’t we do the same here? Just look at some of the fast-selling cars in automakers’ lineups to see what I’m on about. Kia sold 30,258 Fortes last quarter, Honda sold 25,951 Civics last quarter, Nissan sold 18,565 Sentras last quarter, all of which are solid numbers for cars that are quite attainable. The subcompact crossover segment largely can’t keep up with compact cars, which means there’s genuine desire for these attainable vehicles and price is a key factor. Electric cars don’t need to be kei car cheap, but they shouldn’t be expensive either. In addition, we can’t incentivize EVs forever. Plus, we’ll eventually need a way to make up for gas tax revenue lost due to going electric. It’s not just possible for EV ownership to get more expensive in the future, it’s almost inevitable. The BBC reports that British electric car owners will need to pay Vehicle Excise Duty from 2025, just like owners of gasoline-powered cars do. States like Illinois and Georgia already charge dedicated EV fees to make up for lost gas tax revenue, and more states could join them in the future. Building cheaper EVs would help offset some of the total cost of ownership, which is important in an age where everything is expensive. The bottom line is that if you want to sell more EVs, you have to build more EVs that everyday people can actually afford to buy. A $60,000 electric crossover isn’t saving the planet. It’s a luxury good, albeit likely a very nice one. A $20,000 electric car, though? That’s something people will buy in droves and will genuinely make a difference on our vehicle fleet’s carbon footprint. So, who will take up the gauntlet? Lead photo credit: Honda
Nissan’s Sold-Out Sakura EV Highlights A Need For Affordable Electric Cars A Professional Car Designer Explains What Makes The Honda e So Wonderful Report On Fastest Growing Brands For 2022 Might Be Bullshit But Here’s A ‘Great Value’ Cream Cheese-Themed Mitsubishi Mirage Anyway The Hero Of The LA Auto Show Was This Dirt-Cheap Kia Rio How My Changli Inspired A Man To Start Selling Cheap, Low-Speed, Street-Legal EVs In The U.S. Want to write for The Autopian? Pitch us here. Or check out the stories on our homepage. You’re right, it’s .80 to convert UK mpg to US. Yeah um… 10k before fees and such. It seems like this is CAD but I might be wrong. Highly dubious, as with few exceptions, people don’t buy droves of the ~$20K cars that exist now. There’s no stampede to the Mitsubishi dealer to pick up a new Mirage. I suspect the only way to reach cost parity is to decontent even further which may please the Luddites of this comments section, but likely will make the penalty boxes even more of a tough sell the average buyer. THIS is the way to do it. Let Joe Sixpack buy a $20k car that can out-accelerate and at least for a small number of laps(keeping in mind the small battery) out-track a six-figure supercar. The performance is given in exchange for all the bloat and features sacrificed, accentuated by the car being inherently light. If that reduces sales of the supercar, so be it. I do think a 20k electric car would be quite popular if reasonable for the price point. Automakers love to make the cheap cars penalty boxes to motivate people to buy more expensive ones though so again, probably not happening. Yeah, I get it. Such a thing will probably never happen. But the theoretical potential is there. Both companies have things they could offer each other. I can forsee Mazda having massive financial problems in the future if it continues on its current trajectory, so they need to be willing to try something new. Tesla is probably a bubble that is about to pop, and they need to find a way to add value in a way that can garner an increase in customers, as they have run out of cultists and government money printing can’t continue forever. I will be surprised if both of these companies still exist in their current form within a decade. But nothing is inevitable if corrected early enough. Whether a product as described would be palatable to the mainstream car buyer is unknown. Nothing like what is described really exists. The Tesla Model 3 is perhaps the closest thing, and at a much higher price point than what is aimed for. It is selling very well. A lot of people of who can’t afford a Model 3 really want one. The most obvious way to reduce cost of such a car is to cut the size of the battery pack. It will need more powerful batteries than the Model 3 comes with, because the goal will be to match the drivetrain’s capabilities with a smaller battery pack thn what comes in a Model 3. This will yield less range, the result of less kWh available. It will also yield less mass, without resorting to any exotic weight reduction strategies, because the pack is so small. The resultant battery pack and motor/inverter/charger/cables/misc EV components combined would have comparable weight to the entirety of a Miata’s ICE system and its ancillaries. Some of the lost range can be retrieved by making the car more slippery than conventional offerings, especially taking an avante garde approach to drag reduction in a way that will willingly sacrifice looks where necessary, but not so much sacrifice conformity to practical constraints that make the car easy to live with as an A to B appliance. Drag coefficients in the mid 0.1X range are doable with this in mind, and will not take a massive per unit cost to achieve on a car if it is mass produced, even if the up-front wind tunnel research costs will be high. It will be a cheaper route to getting more range on a cost per mile of range basis than increasing the size of the battery. Drag reduction also comes with the bonus of increasing the car’s performance, because less horsepower is required versus speed, leaving more spare horsepower available for acceleration, especially as speeds climb after the triple digits. With EV drive systems, cheap performance is doable, and with much less components to mechanically fail. For the last century, the auto industry has always been afraid of offering the slipperiest bastard that remains usable and something most could live with. The average new car’s drag coefficient just recently caught up with the 0.28 published for the 1921 Rumpler Tropfenwagen. The very slipperiest cars in production today are similar in drag coefficient value to the 1935 Tatra T77A. Road-drivable concept cars with drag coefficients in the 0.13-0.16 range in both sedan and sports car formats have been demonstrated in various times and places since the 1950s on through the present day. So it isn’t as if this sort of slipperiness isn’t possible, because it is. All of the elements that could make such a car possible are disparately available in different relatively low-cost cars from different manufacturers. There are so many things possible with today’s tech, that are simply not happening in any frequency beyond what is needed to be a curiosity, rolling science project, or a proof of concept. But all of those things have been demonstrated on U.S. roads in bits and pieces. This why I think such a thing is possible. Will it happen? Probably never. But the world doesn’t have unlimited resources available to continue a paradigm of endless growth. Resources available per capita are in decline as they deplete. If the industry refuses to consider these factors in the design of its products, then its products will eventually no longer have a place in the world because they will no longer be physically possible to manufacture. That very well could be the scenario in my lifetime. And it would have all been preventable had different decisions been made. I doubt it is possible to manufacture a US-legal vehicle for much cheaper than a $16,250 Mirage, and adding even a small battery pack will take that to nearly $20K on its own. Any lightweight materials or non-standard fabrication techniques to achieve a low drag coefficient would add to that. And as a subcompact hatchback, the Mirage is already too small for most buyers. Adding size to make it more appealing to American tastes or more useful to families entails more weight and cost. Which necessitates a larger battery pack, and the doom loop continues. Simply as an engineering exercise, I’d be interested to see what is at the actual limits of possible efficiency. As a practical matter though, I think R&D is better spent by improving the efficiency of more mainstream vehicles. Doesn’t matter. These stupid three wheeler concepts will keep popping up and none will ever go anywhere. Much like Americans don’t seem to be digging on small cars, they certainly won’t buy a three-wheeled egg shell out on public roads. If there were a protected roadway system for very light electric vehicles (like the golf cart trails for NEVs in some southern developments) I may consider it. As long as I have to worry about being seen by the Nissan Titan in the lane next to me, I’ll take some more steel and a few airbags. I believe the primary reason that entry level new cars have mostly gone away is because used cars are so much better than ever. Why suffer in a penalty box when a 5 year old car that’s larger, has more options, and a bigger engine costs the same and still has a decade or more of useful life left? However, for EVs, many potential buyers are concerned with battery degradation. A 5 year old Leaf or Bolt should be a better vehicle to drive than a new $20,000 EV, but a lot of buyers view the 5 year old Leaf or Bolt as a vehicle that is 5 years closer to needing an expensive battery replacement. For that reason alone, I think a cheap new EV could work. Also, for ICE vehicles, there are thousands of good used cars available in the $15,000 to $25,000 range. There are far fewer used EVs in this price range. Used EVs show there is a demand for cheap EVs. If there were a greater supply of cheap EVs (either by more used vehicles or Mirage-quality new ones), more buyers might choose that option. People were buying fully functional Leafs to pull the battery and supporting parts for EV conversions because it was the cheapest way to buy those parts. Used car demand will be smoothing out soon. We’ll get a better idea then of non-panic car values. I can’t sell it to someone in the surrounding suburbs in a cold / snowy area because that range doesn’t allow for a three hour blizzard crawl home with the lights, heater, wipers and defrosters running the entire time. I can’t sell it to someone in another city because they wouldn’t be able to drive it home. Not many normal shoppers would be confident having the thing shipped, and most normal sellers would assume the guy sending a tow truck and a check is a scam. All of this can be avoided by trading it in, but dealerships would use those considerations to beat down the trade-in price. That door and flat floor really are cool right? Also I think the factories were earmarked to be used later of ID family production. Personally I wish they would again make new version of the e-Golf. It was really nice car apart from missing heatpump and few other winter friendly features. ID3 is really hideous in comparison. Because a non-trivial percentage of Americans who drive eight miles per day believe if they don’t have the ability to drive four hundred miles nonstop, fill up in two minutes, and drive another four hundred miles nonstop they will literally immediately die and be banished to Communist Hell™ We are going to get to economies of scale with EVs but it is going to take longer than it should and there will be a huge surplus of driver’s seat phone camera rants along the way At any rate the reason Trucks have become so comfortable, have extra doors and often covers over the beds, while also continuously getting better fuel economy is the fact that the price of even sedans has gone above the level where daily beaters are affordable to purchase and worse maintain. add in the issues with many high mile VVT/DOD/EGR motors these days and whammo, people have to buy the swiss army knife Half ton pick up and use it for everything. The fact that the owner may only have to cover 10 miles a day to get to work and back is irrelevant to the car’s range since they will bike / walk / subway to work. Unless they have enough cash to drop a mortgage payment every month on a parking spot, that car probably spends its life parked on a street in Queens and the owner would have to put a fair amount of time into retrieving the car and then finding another parking spot. Street parking offers notoriously few charging options for EVs. If you can afford parking with charging in major city in the northeast, you’re not likely to suffer driving around in a $20k car. The only thing I can see is maybe the word ‘Queens.’ Can anyone familiar with these things elaborate? I’d just rather not have the staff here approving my posts. I assume there are things they’d rather be doing. That being said with the super slick folding seats on this van I bet it would be considered a passenger van and so the chicken tax wouldn’t apply to it. I second the idea of reintroducing the Honda Element as an EV. Add a camper fit option, some safari lights… I’d be all for that. It’s basically a motorcycle that someone can load with children and still text while operating. If they were ever made legal, that legality would last until the first multi-fatality accident involving one of them. It would be a matter of weeks. It would absolutely be an Uber / Lyft driver. Regarding road tax, get it from the freight-haulers. They don’t pay their fair share of the road wear. The Minnesota Department of Transportation did a study 2 decades ago regarding the amount of road wear of a tractor-trailer, and found it induced about 7,000x the road wear of a passenger car. They should be paying 7,000x the cost per mile that a passenger car is. Drivers shouldn’t be subsidizing the trucking industry. This would make more energy efficient methods of freight shipping, like rail, more desirable and investments would go into this instead. When the cost gets to 2x, a local option becomes a viable / cheaper alternative. (That’s also why they bought Mitsubishi – they caught Mitsubishi cheating on emissions when they tested their rebadges themselves, but they wanted to keep using Mitsubishi to make kei cars for them, so buying them out cheap was preferable to letting them go out of business.)
