The most important barrier to the development of any technology project is dealing with its costs. They appear in every single part of this job, which makes extremely important to estimate if the expected return will be good enough. This is why ecological cars are taking long to proliferate – despite being “the right way to go”, they’re still very expensive to develop and their public still isn’t big enough. So whenever a company thinks it has some new way of prospering with them, it doesn’t usually stay thinking for too long.
Projecting an ecological vehicle became so hard because their new technologies have been developed only for a few years, but need to satisfy standards which have increased for several decades. If we look back to when Henry Ford had just released Model T, many people claim that there were already some electric vehicles and that they worked well enough for that time. But becoming that successful when the concept of car wasn’t even totally established yet made everyone think that would be the path to follow. In other words, the automakers started to assume there were some rigid concepts to respect for making an acceptable car: internal combustion propulsion became so essential as using four wheels, to give an example. This is why the following developments of safety, comfort and luxury were joined only by improvements of the existing powertrain, rather than searching for new options. Such strategy resulted on petrol engines having all the last decades to get better in order to suit all the customers’ demands for a car, which have also increased during this time. These are what makes success so hard for the electrics to achieve: their powertrain had been developed again only for fifteen years, while the concept of car has improved for around eight decades.
In nowadays, it’s possible to affirm there are two main options to sell an electric car: aiming for the low-cost or the luxury market. They always need to be reliable and offer a decent range, but the first group also needs to be as cheap as possible, while the other needs to invest on subjective aspects, like attractive design. The Russian ë-crossover’s US$-10.000 price surely takes it to the first group, but it tries to be more. Combining black accents makes the exterior much different, which comes in handy considering this is one more crossover: these cars are true best-sellers around the world, but they’ve become so many that standing out in the crowd is getting harder. However, the interesting outside is followed by a modern-looking interior, whose detached tablet-like central console reminds of the latest Renaults’. The equipment list includes everything it’s expected from this category in nowadays, including infotainment central, two LCD screens, climate control, etc. What is known so far about the powertrain is that ë-crossover brings a hybrid system: the combustion engine can use gasoline or natural gas, and paired to the electric unit achieve a combined 163-hp power. The car goes from 0 to 100 kph in 9s9 and to the top speed of 130 kph, and makes 20,5 km/L. The combined range is 700 km, but only 2 km in the all-electric mode.
