Thursday, December 13, 2018

E-Car Chat

There's a great piece produced by N-TV (German commercial network news) today.....chatting over the change in behavior of electric car drivers in Germany.  I strongly recommend the 'read'.

The study....by Continental Powertrain, using the Infas Institute to gather data....says that e-car drivers are now being conservative about their driving strategy.  The 'known-range' is a big part of the day's affairs. 

But they found that among non-e-car owners....one in five drivers in the youth groups (up to age 30) say they can imagine buying an e-car in the next couple of years.

Those folks see navigational digitization and public info on traffic control systems as a positive. 

But the topic of ride-sharing got brought up.  It's a curious thing for Germans in this poll.....they already had public transportation, and most seemed to see no benefit on ride-sharing.

The fact that we haven't gone past 150,000 plug-in battery cars yet in Germany?  Well....that's the tough part of the sales routine.  This 'known-range' topic makes people apprehensive.  It'd be ok if you had two cars, and one was for local in-city driving only, and the other was a gas car for everything else.....but would you pay 50,000 to 80,000 Euro for a car that you'd only drive within forty kilometers of your house?  Lets also be honest and admit that this 'local strategy' would mean that you'd have a car for fifteen-odd years and probably never have more than 10,000 kilometers a year (6,200 miles roughly). 

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