Another Dealer Quits

[StevenRB45]

Probably along the lines of when it gets to 2030 in the UK or 2035 in the EU for reasons the manufacturer has nothing to do with they can't sell you an ice car even if they want to.

All they can do is sell you what they are allowed to. They could easily make a Citroën Amiesque contraption that did 60mph and 100 miles for 13k. It would fail every single crash test and likely not be legal for sale..but they could build it.

 

[PuntoHowTo]

"priced under $26,800, which promises not to burn a hole in your wallet while you go greener"

These car journalists are getting as out of touch as some wealthy politicians / celebrities who don't know the price of a pint of milk...

For most people, that is simply not considered budget.

A fair point to remember is that if you can’t afford it, then you’re not the target market

£21k is dirt cheap for an EV, you can only bring prices down to a point it’s a massive contradiction to one minute be complaining EVs cost too much, then the next be complaining about the sourcing of materials and the Labour used.
To ethically source materials you have to pay more, to make cars cheap you have to pay as little as possible for materials and labour. Catch 22, you can’t have it all.

This applies to anything, you want cheap clothes then you may have to accept that somewhere along the like child Labour may have been used.


Thinking about inflation I looked at a Renault Clio new back in 2001 when I was a mere teenager, this was a brand new car and was priced around £8750. It was a pretty basic car with no aircon or other gadgets, but by todays money it would be about £16k.

Companies selling brand new cars at £10-15k doesn’t make sense anymore and with companies like fiat fighting for survival they cannot afford to sell something like a panda for a tiny margin on each car, they either need to be selling massive volumes (which they’re not) or they need to sell a more premium model with a bigger margin.

It seems fiat are moving towards an all electric future, as all manufacturers will by 2030, if you can’t keep up with that then it’s used Ice cars for the foreseeable future, but electric cars are an inevitability, it has nothing to do with why the dealerships are closing left, right and centre now.

 

[SB1500]

I

Probably along the lines of when it gets to 2030 in the UK or 2035 in the EU for reasons the manufacturer has nothing to do with they can't sell you an ice car even if they want to.

All they can do is sell you what they are allowed to. They could easily make a Citroën Amiesque contraption that did 60mph and 100 miles for 13k. It would fail every single crash test and likely not be legal for sale..but they could build it.

I think it’s a shame. 2050, sure, different world by then. 2030, not so much.

What they’re risking is that the EU-domestic car firms due to being forced end up putting all their eggs in one basket and shutting down engine plants whilst the Asians and Americans continue to innovate with hybrids and alternative solutions to the problem.

Then, if the technology doesn’t mature by 2030 and normal consumers get bit, we and the EU will be in trouble. Legislation can be delayed (and I think it will be). The last X years of development etc, that can’t be made up for soon enough in today’s competitive market when politicians find they are as wrong as always about the planet. It’s the EU-domestic car companies that will suffer including Fiat. At least the dealers can switch to whoever’s product is best with some flexibility.

 

[PuntoHowTo]

What they’re risking is that the EU-domestic car firms due to being forced end up putting all their eggs in one basket and shutting down engine plants whilst the Asians and Americans continue to innovate with hybrids and alternative solutions to the problem.

Then, if the technology doesn’t mature by 2030 and normal consumers get bit, we and the EU will be in trouble. Legislation can be delayed (and I think it will be). The last X years of development etc, that can’t be made up for soon enough in today’s competitive market when politicians find they are as wrong as always about the planet. It’s the EU-domestic car companies that will suffer including Fiat.

This appears to just be word salad?

No they’re not going to delay the 2030 cut off for the sale of fossil fuel cars, this was stated only In the last couple of weeks.

As @StevenRB45 already pointed out the premium on new fossil fuel cars is to pay forward the R&D needed to switch to electric and meet that 2030 target.

ICE cars will continue to be made and sold in third world countries sure but they’re not going to spend any amount of money on R&D for countries where they sell very basic cars at very low prices.
The internal combustion engine has been around a very long time and regardless of improvements in emissions over the last few years, there hasn’t been any significant “innovation” it still goes suck squeeze bang blow and that’s not changed since the Benz patent motorwagen in 1885.

Solid state batteries are now here and these will have a massive impact on the proliferation of electric cars as well as the costs

 

[s130]

Ignoring the polution that ICE create, even if little these days, the worlds oil resources are massive. However other materials like copper (now few pure copper cables anymore they a alloys of copper) are running out and when we get to materials like gold, silver, titanium and rare earth like LITHIUM one needs to start asking questions about the sustainability. Also some of these materials come from poorer countries desparate for money and more likely to use cheap and exploited labour and poor safety etc. standards.

 

[StevenRB45]

I'm yet to see what I would call a definitive accounting of the various costs environmental or social.

Mainly it's a very complex issue and most studies seem to be funded by a vested interest and find exactly what you'd expect that interest to say. Eg. Ones funded by oil companies tend to ignore/minimise the environmental impact of drilling for oil and transporting oil.

However from a dealer/company point of view doesn't matter legally that's the course of action as dictated by central government, follow it or shut up shop.

At least the new Panda is small battery do you can get 3 cars out of the amount of material needed for a BMW i7.

 

[SB1500]

Ignoring the polution that ICE create, even if little these days, the worlds oil resources are massive. However other materials like copper (now few pure copper cables anymore they a alloys of copper) are running out and when we get to materials like gold, silver, titanium and rare earth like LITHIUM one needs to start asking questions about the sustainability. Also some of these materials come from poorer countries desparate for money and more likely to use cheap and exploited labour and poor safety etc. standards.

As far as I can gather - and despite being very against EVs as it stands today, I do watch the odd pro-EV channel / video topic - the only benefits are as follows:

- No tailpipe emissions (better for the air we breathe in inner cities like London)
- Charge it at home (convenience)
- Charge it for then than the fill up of fuel (current temporary benefit, likely to shoot up when we're all dependent on it)

A full look into our climate issues on Planet Earth and you'll find that it's about way more than the car pollution (even totalled up by country). It's shocking how little normal, everyday peoples commuting actually makes a difference. I will try to find the stats, but I'd look at things like the UN sustainable development goals and avoid any studies by "climate activist groups" as well as by lobbied research labs funded by oil companies etc.

I'd also like to say that a large amount of the research into renewable energy has come as a split from many of the large oil companies profits (as they themselves want the positive press today, but also, plausible ways to remain leaders in energy in the next 100-200 years onward if they can manage to find a sustainable / profitable one).

I think it'd be nice if the EV legislation mandated people in certain cities (big pollution zones) to only be allowed EVs where they can make a genuine difference to peoples lives and those environments. And leave the folks like us and the ones in the Scottish Highlands who travel long distances (largely for basic life tasks) with our fuel cars and practical need for them. But I suppose such a rule would be seen as discriminatory. Not that any of the ultra-rich would suffer, they could simply keep their Tesla's at their Kensington addresses and move their gas guzzling Range Rover to their Cheshire estate address ;-)

 

[s130]

Well I could add to all of this is that whilst say the UK/EU, just a small part of the planet, push for zero the rest of the world like China, Russia and other counties are still allowed and do pump.

We in the UK donate/give much money to foreign countries like India. But India are a nuclear power, in the space race, etc.

Do not want to get into politics but for me the balance is totally wrong. We cut emmissions etc. and the rest just keep pumping. I'll accept the development and technology evolution is most likely to come from the likes of the UK / EU / USA but actually the real problems are world wide and counties like the UK, politicians etc. are just toooo self and locally centrered and don't see the bigger picture.

 

[PuntoHowTo]

At least the new Panda is small battery do you can get 3 cars out of the amount of material needed for a BMW i7.

I was thinking about this, and if they can genuinely bring a ~£21k EV to market, I suspect it will be a big sales success for fiat especially if based on the C3, as this will make the panda a ‘small family’ sized car which is perfect for most peoples needs. The panda being a 5 door car makes it much more practical than something like the 500e and it will be massively cheaper than the 600. It would actually be likely to pee on VW chips with their proposed £24ish-K iD1/iD2 (or whatever they decide to call it)

And yes a small car like this is going to use considerably less resources than a massive suv type EV.

Though I suspect by the time it gets to us in the uk it might not be a sub £22k car but we’ll wait and see.

As stated above a budget car from 2001 would be about £16k now, so something like this panda which is unlikely to be “budget” I’d expect it to have aircon and maybe heated seats and steering wheel as a lot of EVs have, as well as an advanced infotainment system. It will be pretty incredible if they can get that in under £22k

 

[StevenRB45]

As stated above a budget car from 2001 would be about £16k now, so something like this panda which is unlikely to be “budget” I’d expect it to have aircon and maybe heated seats and steering wheel as a lot of EVs have, as well as an advanced infotainment system. It will be pretty incredible if they can get that in under £22k

I suspect they are going to be related to this..

Citroen eC3 Price - Features, Images, Colours & Reviews

Citroen eC3 price starts at ₹ 11.61 Lakh in New Delhi. Checkout Citroen eC3 images, reviews, colours, variants and on-road price at Cardekho.

www.google.com

It's 11 grand I think..rupee exchange is vaguely baffling.

It's clearly not something you could sell here given power output is 2 more than a 1.1 panda and safety is cack but for twice as much they could definitely get towards an actual car.

 

[PuntoHowTo]

I suspect they are going to be related to this..

Citroen eC3 Price - Features, Images, Colours & Reviews

Citroen eC3 price starts at ₹ 11.61 Lakh in New Delhi. Checkout Citroen eC3 images, reviews, colours, variants and on-road price at Cardekho.

www.google.com

It's 11 grand I think..rupee exchange is vaguely baffling.

It's clearly not something you could sell here given power output is 2 more than a 1.1 panda and safety is cack but for twice as much they could definitely get towards an actual car.

It definitely has a panda look about it, whack a fiat badge on and you’ve easily got a new panda.

I agree about safety it’s probably all mild steel and lacking material in areas where it would only be needed for safety, but in an eu market with more sound deadening. A bit more refinement, and some boron steel with a few more airbags and it would be passable.

The 60hp motor would probably need to be significantly increased in power to sell over here, 60hp on a tiny petrol car might be ok but lugging a 35-40kWh battery (which is what would be needed to maintain a 200mile range) is going to require a bit more Ooomph

I don’t hate it, look like it has a lot of potential to be a fun little car. Brilliant for a school run or trip to the shops

 

[PuntoHowTo]

Ignoring the polution that ICE create, even if little these days, the worlds oil resources are massive. However other materials like copper (now few pure copper cables anymore they a alloys of copper) are running out and when we get to materials like gold, silver, titanium and rare earth like LITHIUM one needs to start asking questions about the sustainability. Also some of these materials come from poorer countries desparate for money and more likely to use cheap and exploited labour and poor safety etc. standards.

As we keep finding out the worlds oil reserves just get bigger and bigger. When I was at school back in the 80/90s we were told the oil would have run out by now but here we are still pumping millions of barrels of the black stuff every day.

Where demand is high the motivation to find it is high and I think this will carry over to materials used in batteries, at the moment things like lithium and cobalt are “rare” but as the demand for EVs goes up it’s amazing how we keep finding more and more.

The advantage of rare earth metals used in batteries have over oil is that the oil once burnt can’t be recycled, lithium in batteries is now commonly being recycled.

Even where the batteries are not recycled at a basic materials level they are finding uses for the batteries out of electric cars such as in home storage batteries so they may get two lives before heading off to be chemically recycled back into another new battery

 

[StevenRB45]

It definitely has a panda look about it, whack a fiat badge on and you’ve easily got a new panda.

I agree about safety it’s probably all mild steel and lacking material in areas where it would only be needed for safety, but in an eu market with more sound deadening. A bit more refinement, and some boron steel with a few more airbags and it would be passable.

The 60hp motor would probably need to be significantly increased in power to sell over here, 60hp on a tiny petrol car might be ok but lugging a 35-40kWh battery (which is what would be needed to maintain a 200mile range) is going to require a bit more Ooomph

I don’t hate it, look like it has a lot of potential to be a fun little car. Brilliant for a school run or trip to the shops

I'm not particularly a fan think the Panda rendering looks significantly better...but it is what it is and the various things I've seen suggest the new Panda and C3 will be on the low cost CMP platform which is what this is built on.

But in terms of technical interest, it's got a 29.2kwh battery and a range of 198 miles. This gives a miles per KWH of pretty much double anything VW group currently sells as far as I can see. They can match the range with half the battery pack size, there would seem to be a serious possibility to under cut in that alone. Not forgetting the much lower kerb weight driving lower costs for things like suspension, brakes, tyres and crash structure. Also cheaper running costs as literally using less "fuel" to do the same distance.

A bit more power may need a bigger battery pack but they are targeting 186 miles on wltp which in theory the 29.2 could manage while pushing some more power.

They are teasing the new C3 now so there will probably be actual specs to discuss shortly.

 

[SB1500]

Well I could add to all of this is that whilst say the UK/EU, just a small part of the planet, push for zero the rest of the world like China, Russia and other counties are still allowed and do pump.

We in the UK donate/give much money to foreign countries like India. But India are a nuclear power, in the space race, etc.

Do not want to get into politics but for me the balance is totally wrong. We cut emmissions etc. and the rest just keep pumping. I'll accept the development and technology evolution is most likely to come from the likes of the UK / EU / USA but actually the real problems are world wide and counties like the UK, politicians etc. are just toooo self and locally centrered and don't see the bigger picture.

That's very true. Whilst we're getting mad a certain political figures of the last decade, we need to remember that some of those notable 'crazy' decisions was a rare exercise in trying to make the rest of the world realise that if not everybody is committed, what impact can we all truly make to contributing to the solution?

And also, we pay quite highly at the pump because our domestic production of oil / petrol / diesel is cut so at the end of the year we can boast we 'reduced output of fossil fuels', but that doesn't mean the demand or dependence fell. It means our importing from these countries pumping at insane rates increases, as does our import spending. These facts are swept under the rug in our publications about how green we are. The people gluing themselves to the road do so to get nonsensical commitments from politicians (which they deliver and the headlines often look great) but in reality is it actually helping to solve the problems we face?

I think there's very few 'climate deniers' out there, and I think the majority of EV critics are believers in the problems we face. I think the people labelled as 'idiots' and 'climate deniers', for the most part actually just don't believe that the 'sacrifices' we (e.g. the middle class and below) have to make to our lives unless it actually solves the problem. Before you can get into a reasonable discussion with people on this, they write you off as above, as an 'idiot' or such.

Also, some of the poorer countries in the world depending so heavily on these planet killing fuels and energy means do so because we fail to recognise that the biggest 'emergencies' affecting people today aren't the climate. It's things like sanitation and education in those nations so they can lift themselves out of needing to do planet destroying to keep the lights on and keep warm. That was us, the average working class European under 200 years ago. If we can recognise that and stop gluing ourselves to the road and ruining live sports finals, we can help way more people in our lifetime with our limited time and resources, and have more educated, healthy people on a global scale working toward the goal of how we're going to improve our impact on the planet. It's the poorer nations to blame for the majority of pollution = yes. But it's us to blame for our (and their) lack of action in any effective way because we're naive to believe that the #1 problem today is... climate change. Absolute rubbish.

It's a long term issue and it's not going away, but what we do now and the impact it has does matter. And we can't get past short-minded politicians making themselves look good at our expense, whilst we enter into the next 10-20 year phase of EVs "the saviour of the planet"... just like diesels were, right? ...

 

[PuntoHowTo]

I'm not particularly a fan think the Panda rendering looks significantly better...but it is what it is and the various things I've seen suggest the new Panda and C3 will be on the low cost CMP platform which is what this is built on.

But in terms of technical interest, it's got a 29.2kwh battery and a range of 198 miles. This gives a miles per KWH of pretty much double anything VW group currently sells as far as I can see. They can match the range with half the battery pack size, there would seem to be a serious possibility to under cut in that alone. Not forgetting the much lower kerb weight driving lower costs for things like suspension, brakes, tyres and crash structure. Also cheaper running costs as literally using less "fuel" to do the same distance.

A bit more power may need a bigger battery pack but they are targeting 186 miles on wltp which in theory the 29.2 could manage while pushing some more power.

They are teasing the new C3 now so there will probably be actual specs to discuss shortly.

I think for the uk or europe the car would be heavier so would likely need more power from the motor and therefore a slightly bigger battery.

The 500e has a “199 mile range” so that 199 mile mark seems to be a target for them ~320km

If it was even just a second car in a family doing short school runs and trips to the shops, maybe someone to go back and forth to the office a few times a week, that sort of range would be perfect more than enough.

I’ve not see a fiat rendering but I don’t suspect they have changed much, maybe like the fiat version of the ami it looks more or less the same car with a different badge?

If they did change the body at all I could see them making the fiat version more “boxy” to make it follow the lines of the pandas of the past

 

[StevenRB45]

If you ignore the wheels and no back doors as concept car fluff..and the front and rear are mouldings that can be changed

In terms of silhouette it's very similar. Down to the wheel arches but on the C3 they are one colour.

 

[PuntoHowTo]

If you ignore the wheels and no back doors as concept car fluff..and the front and rear are mouldings that can be changed

In terms of silhouette it's very similar. Down to the wheel arches but on the C3 they are one colour

It’s definitely more upmarket than fiats of the past. Historically fiat do make concept cars that really stand out but then massively dial it back for the production model.

Go check out the 1999 fiat ecobasic which became the 2003 panda. Then there was an early panda concept circa 2000-02 that looked more like the panda cross that didn’t come out till 2008/9

Though these days manufacturing processes make it much cheaper and easier to make more complex shapes and designs than it did years back, a car needs to stand out to sell as the 500 proved

 

[StevenRB45]

Well that one is the Centoventi..which is a pre-stellantis thing.

Auto express have provided this...do hope not as while it's realistic it's a bit grim. Although PSA has form with different coloured plastic inserts so black isn't necessarily what the nose and arches would be.

Bit of history for that sort of thing..

 

[PuntoHowTo]

I do t trust anything auto express do, they have a team dedicated to photoshopping what they think the next model of ….. will look like, they very rarely are anything near right, and if you look at the images it can sometimes be pretty obvious where they have taken the car parts from, for example they look like Skoda or seat wheels on that picture above

 

[vexorg]

I think there's very few 'climate deniers' out there, and I think the majority of EV critics are believers in the problems we face. I think the people labelled as 'idiots' and 'climate deniers'

I'm often called a climate denier, though that's not true, you can see changes in the climate, but I'm not convinced people are the cause, there's every chance things would be the same with no action or intervention of people.

I think the protesters (or whatever climate change people want to be called) jump on these single events and say "look, the world is on fire!". 10 years ago we were on rhodes and it was heat wave 42-44 deg C every day we were they, happens now and the sky is falling down.
Or when they talk of volcanoes pumping out more polutants and particles in one eruption that the whole human race then you really do wonder. The world cycles, ice ages were due to no cars. The sun controls our environment more than they want to admit.