It has a top speed of just 45 kilometers an hour, roughly equal to 28 miles per hour
In the USA, we'd call that a NEV (Well, almost -- NEV's are limited to 40km/hr), and they are significantly cheaper than regular cars since they meet lower crash standards.
I wish NEV's were more popular here, they'd be great for short commutes, a 10 mile commute would take 30 minutes and you can fit more than one NEV in a traditional parking space. I thought about getting one for errands around town, but even though they may be legal on roads with speed limits up to 45mph, I'd be afraid to drive one even on a 35mph road since a 35mph speed limit means most people are driving 40 - 45mph.
NEV seem to be popular around retirement communities in the U.S. This is also where one is most likely to find mature, patient, and courteous drivers (so, about the only place an NEV is safe from one's personal perspective).
28 mph is pretty damn fast when you're riding an e-bike. I would absolutely not feel comfortable going faster than that. It's all a matter of perspective. If you're 14 feet up the air driving your pennyfarthing-SUV hauling your collection of outdoor wizardry to the steam-engine conference, then it's slow.
The default speed limit in New York is 25mph, now. I don't know if NEVs are legal. Cars driven primarily in New York lead a hard life. The low cost, small size, and low maintenance of NEVs could work for New York. Electric bikes are popular in New York, which could indicate an opportunity.
The ultimate problem with these kinds of cars is that they're generally intended for city driving. This is fine, except most city dwellers don't have a place to park electrics that also happen to have an outlet.
This leads most ownership to be on the outskirts/suburbs of cities where people will more likely have a domicile with some kind of garage or spec right where they live so they can drive to/from the city or to a mass transit station that serves the city and happens to have parking, yet too far out and it's more likely that those people will need a more robust vehicle for their driving needs.
There's definitely a market for these kinds of vehicles, but it exists in a fairly thin band right at the edges of urban areas.
They could be useful for rentals like zip car. I have a few hold out friends in San Francisco without cars. The thing that all say sucks for them is shopping. Being able to rent a small car to go shopping would be a big boon for them.
The other thing I think is a big issue with cars in urban cities is parking. There are simply not enough. Smaller cars would help a bit.
If we can get the speed to 35 mph I could see myself buying one and parking it behind the car I have now. I could see myself parting with 7500 to get it. Or is something like that already in the us (new I mean)?
For such a small car, perhaps it fits into a motorbike spot in a parking garage, there are plenty of these to rent in European cities, a moment's walk from the apartment.
Here in NYC, a parking spot in a garage can cost more than a car payment AND it won't have an outlet in most cases.
There is a small electric car charging pilot starting soon, but the rates are so ridiculously high (2x retail electric prices) that gas cars would be much more economical.
Source: I live in NYC and thought about getting an electric car to save money when visiting family + make a few road trips cheaper
That senior writer at CNN sure must have a weird washing machine. But yeah, I guess a title like that generates a lot of clicks and more mental fuel (ignore the pun) to just point and laugh at EVs.
Had me wonder too. I am over 6 feet tall. Not too many washing machines I can fit into. I think ride on lawn mower would be a more accurate description.
I love comparing apples and oranges too. You can always find an older used car that is cheaper than a new car. Now compare what one of these would cost used in 7 years.
BTW, I recently bough a new bicycle that cost more than the first car I drove (the car was a few hundred bucks).
> compare what one of these would cost used in 7 years.
Probably nothing at all, unless it becomes a collectors' item.
In comparison with other voiture sans permis like the Ligier or Aixam then it's cheap. But if we allow comparisons with non-electric vehicles then you can get a new Dacia Sandero in the UK for GBP 6 995, only about 25% more than the price of the Ami: https://www.dacia.co.uk/vehicles/sandero/configurator/summar...
Not sure what you mean about apples and oranges comparisons. Both of the objects in question are cars, both the Leaf and the Ami are electric.
The Ami is much less car so one might expect that it should be much cheaper and it is cheaper than a new Leaf or Zoe, but my point was that new cars have to compete against both new and second hand cars. The only thing the Ami has in its favour is that people without full driving licenses can drive one. A point against the Ami is that it must not be driven on motorways and other roads designated as express way. When one can buy a much better second hand car with no such restrictions for the same or lower price why would anyone buy the Ami?
Only a very tiny segment of the population would find it attractive.
As far as I can tell no one drives cars like the Ami (Ligier, Aixam, etc.) to school here in Norway either.
Probably more likely in France. But my impression is that even there in the past they were mostly popular with people whose ordinary car license had been revoked for drunk driving.
"The car was 7kw fast-charged 3,800 times and 3.3kw trickle-charged 7,000 times during its working life at the company’s business in St Austell, Cornwall.
Mark Richards, C&C transport manager, was impressed that the Leaf retained 70% of its battery capacity after 174,000 miles and said that other than the maximum range, the performance of the vehicle is just as good as the day it was bought.
...
Wizzy had no breakdowns during its high-mileage four-year working life. Outside of scheduled annual services, the Leaf went through three sets of wipers, two sets of brake pads for the front and rear and one damper, as well as tyre replacements when necessary."
This suggests that the Leaf in the ad has most of its original range as it will not have been charged nearly so often.
I work under 5 miles from my home in a city in the Northwestern US. I ride a 50cc moped throughout the warm
months here (anything over mid-50 F so late-March through mid-October usually). I think a reliable sub-40mph electric would work well for me the other times of the year provided it could drive in the snow if equipped with reasonable snow tires.
I have a little 125cc Honda Monkey with a top speed of 45mph (55mph downhill). Not able to go 40mph seems like I’d be moving dangerously slow on a lot of roads.
But I agree, I want a tiny smart-car-like vehicle for when it’s too cold or wet.
> In some ways, the Ami is reminiscent of Citroën's iconic 2CV.
Truer than the writer thinks. It’s a deliberate homage: the original 1970s Citroen Ami was a part of the 2CV range. Our family had one. Very few survive now: I haven’t seen one on the move for about 10 years.
I want to see "closed" electric bikes with wide tyres , basically a batpod with glasses. Good in traffic, and cold/hot as I need it to be. Also cheap enough for Mass use. China would buy two for each person.
Reading the comparison to a classic, I took the minimalist philosophy to manifest as a reduction in complexity, but I had to stop at the moment they mentioned having a smartphone for gauges.
I get that this is probably a cost cutting measure, but putting enough electronics in a car to make a smartphone an important component of it doesn't fill me with confidence in the minimalism (and robustness, accessibility, repairability) of the computers inside, straying from a chunk of what made classics in the 20th century classics.
EDIT: seems that my post was misunderstood. I'm all in favor of cutting cost and not having speakers or a radio, or gauges. But I seriously doubt that minimalism is the leading idea in this car, if it has enough electronics to drive a phone. The more electronics, the less minimalistic, and less repairable an object is. I would not consider very minimalistic a vehicle that has any digital electronics apart from the maintenance port mandated by law.
>having a car with no inbuilt radio/speakers will be strange.
That may be the problem with your thinking. By their own definition, it is more of a luxurious golf cart than it is an automobile.
From the article:
>but the two-seat Ami is barely a car. In fact, Citroën refers to it as a "non-conformist mobility object.
>It has a top speed of just 45 kilometers an hour, roughly equal to 28 miles per hour. It's powered by a 6 kilowatt, or 8 horsepower, electric motor.
>For that reason, though, the Ami can be driven by kids as young as 14 in France, or 16 in many other European countries, without a license.
>Under the laws of these countries, the Ami qualifies as a voiture sans permis (literally "car without license"), or quadricycle, a category of small and slow vehicle that, for purposes of regulation, is treated like a four-wheeled scooter.
Except this is wrong, the "cars without license" actually need their own specific license to drive (unless you were born before 1988, so not a teenager).
It's an electric car it really only needs 2 gauges: range and speed. Everything else is optional information. Hell, even for ICE cars with automatic transmission getting a dashboard with a tach was considered a factory option.
It says it has the gauges, the phone is for extra info like range and navigation. But I agree, having a car with no inbuilt radio/speakers will be strange.
> having a car with no inbuilt radio/speakers will be strange.
I actually like that part about it!
Most in-car infotainment systems (esp. in this price range) are useless anyway, and are basically already outdated on the day they leave the factory.
You'll always end up with using your phone instead of the build-in system, as it is orders of magnitudes better at doing everything. So why car manufacturers even bother with trying to build their own systems always seemed weird to me.
Not sure if the car has no build-in speakers at all, the article doesn't mention that. Maybe it does have build-in speakers with bluetooth connectivity, just no head-unit (frontend).
I wasn't talking about the speakers, but the head-unit itself. This is often not just a radio, but an integrated unit with display, controls etc for navigation, radio, HVAC etc.
In just about any car produced >2000 these radios are integrated in the dashboard, thus not easily replaceable.
For you and I maybe, for kids born in the 2000s ? They won't even notice. They all sit in cars with tablets and pills/bt-speakers over 4g connections. My cousin even unplugged the external antenna for some reason. I think this tiny cart took the current generation practices deeply in.
I'm currently using a bluetooth speaker in my car while I fix the stereo. Two minor UX issues I'm having:
* Unlike the builtin system in my 15 year old car, the bluetooth speaker doesn't adjust volume with my car's speed, so I have to constantly adjust it.
* The speaker's interface isn't designed to be used without looking (small buttons flush with the housing) so adjusting the volume all the time is particularly annoying.
...There's only a minimal gauge cluster. An app in the driver's smart phone, placed in a holder high in the center of the dashboard acts like the central display screen in other cars showing things like driving range...
Oh great. So without a working, compatible phone, the driver has no idea when the car is about to run out of battery?
My USB connections (for Android Auto) to my car are very reliable, maybe one day a month I have an issue and have to unplug and replug, or more rarely reboot my phone, but I've never not gotten it to work before my commute.
Who cares who owns a phone, it's silly to require one to use a basic function of the vehicle when you can have a couple LED lights do the same. What if I loose my phone? Or I drop it and the precious screen shatters? Lazy engineering.
And, presumably, this opens up the door for the manufacturer to force obselecense by not updating the car "app" to work with newer phone operating systems.
Yet another product I can't purchase because I'm unwilling to be tied to a software ecosystem that discourages ownership.
If you are rational about cost and downside risk of version compatibility, at worst, this puts about $50 at risk, which is the price of a cheap tablet or second hand phone. That's less than the cost of replacing a remote locking fob.
Sure-- $50 per "connected device" I want to keep working on my terms. There's also the cost of "care and feeding" labor for the then-dedicated mobile device. There's battery hygiene. There's certificates expiring and rigging the clocks to keep things working. There's firewalling and proxying the devices against the inevitable vulnerabilities making them unsafe to have even on my home network.
That's assuming it's even possible to keep things running, too. If the manufacturer needlessly brings a "cloud service" into the mix my "connected device" stops working when the plug is pulled on a service I can't self-host and can't pay to keep going.
For any one device it's probably no big deal. If my time is worthless it's no big deal. If my familiarity and comfort-with-routine with a particular device's workflow is worthless then it's no big deal.
When it's a multiple of devices in your life, when you place a high value on your time, and when you derive tremendous personal value out of muscle memory and personal routine then I think it adds up to a bill-of-goods.
The general nature of the market for "connected devices" is demoralizing and draining. I don't want to throw all my shit away every couple of years based on the aggregate of various manufacturers. I don't want to change my routine because some marketing plan dictates I no longer get to use something I've incorporated into my life.
It's massively frustrating that "the future" has arrived for so many things, except nobody will sell it to me on terms I can accept. I don't have enough time in my life to build the stuff myself. I'm a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a mainstream market so nobody will ever create what I want.
I can think of a decent number of "connected" devices I'd love to but, except they don't exist in a form that respects me. They exist in forms made to serve manufacturer's needs to sell me the same thing again in a few years, to build the lowest cost, most disposable devices for the maximization of profit with no regard for the environment, and to have the lowest long-term maintenance cost for software (by way of just throwing it all out and re-spinning every few years).
It's only got a 40 mile range, you ought to be able to guesstimate pretty well how far you have left if your phone dies while you're out. You're not going to be going too far from familiar routes from home in this car.
There are multiple causes of death for phones. My last one met its end when it slipped out of my hands and into a puddle of water. So it's entirely feasible that you could be out with your EV and end up with a dead phone and no gauges for your car. But that's probably not a serious problem.
Decoupling the computer from the car is fantastic and I wish more cars (and TVs...) became more dumb:
It's cheaper, better for the environment, more upgradable, more customizable, etc...
Until the car is too old and the app is either upgraded to be no longer compatible with the car or abandoned and becomes no longer compatible with modern phones.
I've never heard of fuel gauges being particularly damaging to the environment.
Sure, let the car stereo connect to my phone so I can play my music if I want. But don't take away simple, basic, essential functionality and lock it in a phone app that I will have to trust/hope will continue to be supported for as long as I own the vehicle.
After a downpayment of €2600 euros it says, and that's only including an 'ecobonus' of 900, which is a subsidy which only applies in France. Not sure what that means for other EU countries, but I'd take into account a downpayment of €3500 without subsidy (which is exactly half of the €7000 it costs without the subsidy).
And it's explicitly a down payment, not a deposit. I don't know exactly how that works in combination with a 4-year lease of €240 a year, totalling €960. I assume after 4 years, the lease ends, you don't own anything, and you're down 3500+960 = €4460, or €€3560 in France. That equals €92 a month for the lease. If you factor in time value of money over 4 years (or financing the downpayment), you're looking at €100 a month minimum.
Not sure if everything is included in this lease... insurance, taxes etc? I assume it does.
Not a bad deal, particularly for young city-dwellers. But at just €100 more, for €200, I can get something like a Toyota Aygo which has an 800km range instead of a 75km range and refuels in a minute instead of 3 hours, and seats 4 instead of 2, and can take trips outside the city.
Great city car, but spending 7k on a car that can't go to another city 30 minutes away, seems a bit silly. I think it's great for ridesharing though. We've had the Smart Electric cars in Amsterdam for a few years now at 25-30 cents per minute or so, they're quite nice. I typically use bike/publictransport, but when you're with a friend, it's raining or you have to go to the other side of the city, particularly after midnight or with annoying public transport transfers, the car is nice. But as you can see, it's already a niche category for me. Once these things become super cheap and ubiquitous, I'd love to use them more. Now I tend to have to walk a minute or two to the nearest one, and it's a bit expensive still. I think these cars would do a better job as they're 2-3x cheaper than the Smart. At some point the per-minute fee should drop for ridesharing to perhaps 15c per minute. At that point it gets interesting, because you get demand, and with demand it makes sense to make them ubiquitous, at which point there's a critical mass for them.
That number seems incomplete at best .... if leasing is purely a financial transaction it seems odd it would cost €6,000 but lease for just €20\month unless there is a large up front downpayment required anyway. That would be a 25 year payback just to cover the initial cost.
You certainly can't lease an existing €60,000 car for €200\month
I like the concept of these, bridging the Gap between a small bike/golf cart and a EV like the leaf, but at least for the US they unfortunately would need to be bigger, from a safety and speed perspective, to catch on.
Maybe something smart car like with a 40-50 mph top speed, sub highway but capable of matching speed on larger roadways. Unfortunately at that point you're probably close to EV cost.
It's so sad that vehicle ownership has become a kind of security dilemma, where people feel forced to constantly buy bigger. I used to cycle to work every day and in recent years I feel less and less safe to do so as more and more cars in the roads have become these massive SUVs and Jeeps. Cyclist deaths are on the rise and it's no wonder when drivers have less ability to see around their vehicles and far more momentum to hit others with.
What you are basically saying is that there is never going to be a market solution to this problem, since no alternative could "catch on". We obviously need government action if we are ever going to kill the addiction to fuel-guzzling vehicles and carbon in general.
The only market solution I can see would be an increase in gas causing people to buy smaller cars. In 2008 SUVs and trucks did poorly vs sedans and hybrids.
For example the Ford F series models sold 690.589 units in 2006 and 413.625 in 2009, but has since climbed back up to around 900,000.
Concerned with your safety, or the safety of others around you?
We seriously need to de-escalate from this mentality in the U.S. There's nothing inherently dangerous about everyone driving smaller and lighter vehicles, and if we find the political will it'd be easy to put society on that trajectory. Convincing people of the damage they're doing to our environment by driving unnecessarily large vehicles is probably the place to start.
With this kind of thinking you'll end up with an arms race for the largest possible car. Guess motorists can play that game, but what about pedestrians and cyclists?
In the USA we're in that arms race, and so far, big cars are winning. I could drive a 2500lb Honda Fit on my commute, but I'm sharing the road with 5000lb+ full-size SUVs and drivers that are not paying attention. I don't want to get crushed between 2 SUV's, so I drive a mid-size sedan instead.
Imagine how a bicyclist feels when a bus or large car drives a few centimeters next to you, I biked once in a city and I decided I can't take the risk so I walked or used public transport instead.
That’s the problem with this car. Only 30 mph means city centers only. In those places there are already many other options for quick trips: public transit, Uber/Lyft, old-fashioned taxis, membership car rentals (Car2go, Zipcar), bicycle sharing, sidewalk scooters. With all that I don’t see them selling too many of these. You buy it, you have to park it, which would be expensive in many of the cities in which you could use it. All those other options don’t need to be parked (not at user’s expense at least.) Even for car rentals parking is a pain because you have to find it, even if you don’t have to pay.
I could see a market of selling them to fleet operators who team up with cities to get free parking for them, as Zipcar and Car2go do, but that’s about it.
I'd say a moped offers more utility and range, and can be had for like a grand used right now, but those haven't caught on in the burbs either. People have a highway mentality in the suburbs. They'd rather get on for one mile and take the next exit than take a parallel running surface road. Plus, suburban commutes are long, even errands are long. This EV claims a 40 mile range, so 30 miles in practice. That can make some trips pretty tight whether or not you get stranded, and there isn't going to be much infrastructure in the suburbs where you can pull off and charge. With more range it would be more viable.
I think a city setting might be better, for cities without too much congestion at least. Otherwise it's another vehicle on the road that could be a moped taking up way less space to move a single butt from their home to their desk in some office building. Cars pollute, but part of their harm in an urban environment is also the amount of physical space that they demand. You can fit way more people in an electric subway train than you can in a similar length line of traffic of these vehicles, for instance.
I live in a first-ring suburb of Philadelphia where we more or less have to drive or bike for everything (there are little downtown areas, but we live 1mi+ from any of them). The top speed limits are 35mph and speeding is rare because the roads are windy and narrow. This Ami would be nearly perfect--the top speed doesn't worry me at all.
The one thing I would say is I wish the range were a bit higher. We have a Ford C-Max plug-in hybrid that gets 18-25 miles before turning on the gasoline motor. Two trips in succession will sometimes run out the electricity. A 50 mile range would make me more comfortable, but still I'm excited to see a vehicle like this (even if I'm not super-hopeful they'll catch on in the US).
Yeah, I have a Prius Prime with similar range. It can do basically one outing and back in my city before it needs charge, and at 6 hours to charge on a 110 that means the gas kicks in many days.
Now, since this is a smaller vehicle with a smaller battery, it might able to charge faster on 110, but likely you'd want a 220 charger.
Really, it feels like all EVs will need a 220 line to be practical. Small-battery and PHEVs need frequent top-ups and you don't want those to take hours, and full EVs just take forever to charge on 110.
I think we need to forgo charging entirely on EVs, and start swapping batteries at gas stations like you would an empty propane tank for a full one.
I saw a demonstration of an electric moped that worked like this. You pull up to the station, put your empty batteries in the rack for charging, and take a set of full ones.
Fully charged EV faster than filling up a tank of gas.
I have a charger for the car on 240V, in our garage. It charges fully in about 2 hours. Mind you this is a plug-in hybrid, with only ~20 mi range before the gas comes on. But still that's lots better than swapping out lots of heavy batteries.
Swapping batteries makes sense for a car you don't own. For a car you own, I don't know. Of course car ownership is probably going away soon enough.
Two hours sucks compared to twenty seconds. It doesn't have to be you swapping the battery. Could be the pimple faced kid working at the gas station, or a robot.
Yes, it takes longer. But it happens while I'm sleeping, and requires no special trip. I do think swapping batteries will be the sensible way to handle this when we're also swapping cars, or when the cars drive us, unless charging times come way down.
Maybe we should rethink how we design our electric vehicles. Still, if the batteries are all mounted along the bottom plate, it wouldn't be too hard to engineer a solution that can drop out, roll away, and have a fresh battery array be reinserted into the vehicle.
We've been siloing our thinking that an EV should be some quasi hybrid between plugging in your phone to charge, and putting in a gas pump into a car. The best and most practical EV in the future will look nothing like a car today. Maybe in the future we will just bring back street car wiring to our cities and run an antennae above the vehicle like a bumper car.
So that would be no where at all where I live. Every single house in this city is on some street that is surrounded by a larger grid of arterial roads, all of them with 35mph speed limits which, when unimpeded by traffic, turn into 45mph minimums and drivers will go out of their way to be a dick to you if you don't adhere to this unspoken rule.
That lease pricing seems off, 5 years x 22$ per month = 1320$ which is likely less than the depreciation. Include say a 2,000$ down payment and sure that works except then the monthly fee is just deceptive.
So it is a golf cart? I must be missing something. I’m not sure why a golf cart would require such fanfare. I guess because most golf carts don’t have doors?
That's exactly what they are. They are ubiquitous among the maintenance staff at most American universities, if you are curious about what some of these look like. Here are a couple that USC uses:
Think the moped of cars. I'd personally love it for grabbing groceries, visiting close friends, jaunts out to dinner and quick errands from spring to fall. I live where many of those things are extremely close.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22438418