Electric cars keep getting cheaper and cheaper, fast. Of course, one easy way to drop the purchase price of an electric car is to drop its battery pack. Naturally, an electric car needs batteries to run, but if the batteries are leased rather than bought, the market opens up to a lot of people who simply don’t like shelling out a lot of cash up front (even if doing so means big savings down the road — no pun intended).
Bollore, which feeds carsharing service Autolib its Bluecar electric cars, is apparently going that battery leasing route. It’s going to start selling cars for €12,000 (US$15,695) and will rent or lease out the battery €80 ($105) per month. By the way, that’s for unlimited mileage.
The Bollore electric car undercuts the price of the Renault Zoe, which comes in at €13,650.
Other notable details regarding the Bollore include that it:
- has four seats
- has a range of 155 miles! (on a full charge)
- can travel up to 75 mph.
Not bad, not bad at all.
I know that battery leasing hasn’t exactly taken off. However, it seems odd that people would have any significant aversion to it. We have a similar payment system for:
- homes (whether we rent them or pay a monthly mortgage)
- cell phone service/plans
- internet
- satellite TV
- and other things.
But hey, I’m just the blogger. What do you think?
Image Credits: Bluecar
Average Eu car makes much less than 1000 km per month. For a car of this size it’s 5l/100 km, so average gas bill is less than 50 euro. So this 80 euro lease makes sense only for heavy users.
Or it can make sense another way which is not to pay a lease but to pay a mileage charge. the typical Israeli driver of 20K KM pays about 20K sheqels under real conditions of urban-suburban travel. S0 at 15K sheqels she will save some, whereas the service provider buys the electricity at 2500 shequels, leaving 12K sheqels to pay for the battery and profit. The battery will pay for itself in five years and after that it’s a win-win.
i’m really liking that pricing based on mileage idea.