Comment by SimonPStevens | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SimonPStevens | Hacker News Reader

I do love this, and hope more things like it gets made so there is choice. It's exactly the kind of thing I want for most of my day to day traveling.

It's competition though is what I did instead. Last year I brought a 7 year old Nissan leaf.

£9,800. 22Kwh battery (probably degraded about 15%, so estimated actual capacity is around 18Kwh) which gives me about 85 miles range with the current battery state. And I get a decent sized boot, 5 seats and 80+mph top speed.

I love my leaf, and use it to commute around 20 miles total each day plus lots of other local travel. It's perfect as a 2nd car for town driving.

However, that 85 mile range is only in good conditions. With the heating on in winter it's range is probably more like 40 miles. I'd say this Citroen's battery is too small for me to buy compared to my leaf. 46 mile range doesn't give you much spare, especially in winter when using heating. Unless charge points become a lot more ubiquitous. It shouldn't take them much to double the battery size though, and then I'd seriously go for this.

(Edit to add, my leaf also has air bags and antilock breaks. What with it being an actual car)

Just wanted to add a "me too" vote: 2013 Nissan Leaf bought used for $8900, 10 of 12 bars of battery remaining, roughly a 25 mile commute ~3 days per week. Miles of range: ~82@city, ~60@highway and ~45@freeway, minus 10 miles if using heater or air conditioner. It's effectively a supercar doing 0-40 mph in about 2-3 seconds, and there's nothing quite as satisfying as leaving expensive sports cars in the dust at a green light. Yes they roar past me at 40, but they paid 10 times more than I did hahaha.

I don't believe in artificial limits for electric vehicles. There's no reason why they can't use a stronger motor, perhaps with extra aluminum wires (to address resource limits around copper and rare earth metals) that engage at high amperages so maybe efficiency drops from 95% to 85% while you floor it. There's no reason why an ultracapacitor couldn't provide twice the amperage for a few seconds of acceleration. $1000 for twice the performance would be worth it IMHO.

So I see these boutique electric vehicles as kind of a gimmick.

Like you I'm happy to see these things being design, if nothing else as experiments. Personally I don't much see the point.

85 miles is fine for many of the thing I need a car for, but once in a while I need the additional range, and I don't want to own two cars. I also need it to be highway safe, if I'm not on the highway I can almost always bike.

Finally: I need my car to be able to pull a trailer, not a big one necessarily. I have a house, some times I need to pick up DIY stuff, or get things to the recycling station.

For people who need a car infrequently, but need it for long distances or larger hauls, there's very little good options, beyond just buying a bigger, expensive car. I could rent, but that limits my use, and if I do that for a couple of time a months I can just buy a used car for the same money.

I guess this wasn’t made targeting you; I’m glad not every vehicle being made it catering to extreme distance needs. There are a lot of places that are walkable or almost walkable. Having cheaper cars for those places that use less material makes it so that more people can have electric vehicles at a time where batteries are a major limiting factor for production.

It will be nice when the cheaper cars are actually cheaper in a useful way. Here, a new Leaf is $45k vs a new Corolla is $25k. The breakeven time on that for my driving patterns is several multiples longer the life of a car. (Not even taking into account that my house would need thousands of dollars of work to be able to practically charge an EV.)

I'm not sure I'd call 85miles extreme distance. It's very low compared to modern EVs.

I'd say this Citroen is totally targeting me. My need is less than 20 miles a day, and I'm saying I'd be nervous about how little buffer that battery would give me.

My point really was 46 miles range is too low, even for low usage. In poor conditions with heating, etc, if the range halves that doesn't leave any spare. Unlike an ICE you can't just run it close the bottom of the tank because charging takes time, and has limited locations.

> charging takes time, and has limited locations.

It does and has not though. This is a 5.5kW battery, and a European vehicle. So charge takes about 3h on a standard wall socket.

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