There is a company in Germany called e.Go Mobile that will soon
start making an electric vehicle for half the price of the cheapest Tesla Model
3. Chances are you haven’t heard of it yet but it has big potential to be in
the news in the near future. That’s because it focuses on making affordable
electric cars, something other companies haven’t quite managed to pull off —
except for some Chinese automakers that haven’t begun exporting cars outside
their home market yet.
e.Go Mobile has been founded by professor Günther Schuh, the man
behind Europe’s best-selling electric van — the StreetScooter sold to Deutsche
Post in 2014. That sale gave him the capital needed to start e.Go Mobile, with
German auto supplier ZF Friedrichshafen later investing € 135 million (US$ 154 million) in the company as part of a project to jointly develop a
self-driving minibus.
e.Go’s first model is called the Life and is a no-frills city car
that offers four-seats inside a slightly shorter bodywork than the Fiat 500‘s
and is available in three different battery configurations. The base e.Go Life
20 packs a 14.9 kWh battery that feeds a 20 kW (27 hp) electric motor for an
NEDC-measured range of 121 km. This version starts from € 15,900 in Germany.
The e.Go Life 40 uses 12.1 kWh battery and a 40 kW (54 hp) motor
for a driving range of 142 km and a € 17,400 starting
price. Finally, the e.Go Life 60 packs a 12.5 kWh battery and a 60 kW (80 hp)
motor and offers a range of 184 km for a base price of € 19,900.
The company says it already has 3,200 pre-orders for the e.Go Life
electric city car and isn’t taking more before it starts production. Bloomberg
reports manufacturing will begin in March 2019 at the Aachen plant, with
deliveries expected to begin the following month. If everything goes according
to plan, by 2022 e.Go Mobile will build 100,000 vehicles a year — as many as
Tesla made in 2017.
