The Tesla Model S is sexy. But that beauty is overdesigned, overstated, and probably overpriced if you are a Chinese pensioner who recently retired from a blue-collar job. Of course, since you are a pensioner, at your age, having a speed-induced adrenaline rush or impressing the opposite sex is hardly as high priority as buying your daily grocery and picking up your grandson from kindergarten. A Model S is in all probability an overkill.
What you need is an ultra cheap, ultra light, ultra fuel-efficient personal commute vehicle, the kind that are running on the lanes of the world’s most populous country in the hundreds of thousands at this very moment.
They are called “elderlies’ walking replacement vehicle”, which says pretty much what they intend to do.
A five-door Smart? No, it is a SIMATE
It so happened that this morning I spotted an EWRV parked out of a local MacDonald's. It is not the first time that I saw one, as they are plenty on Beijing’s streets, especially the less policed suburbs. But never did I have a chance to admire them in close distance.
The first impression is that it is not too shabby a ride. Fifty meters away, one may mistake it as a Smart, Mercedes’ iconic two-seater. Walk closer, its tricks began losing their magic, the toy-like proportions, the 13-inch tiny wheels are still Smart enough, but paintjob is definitely cheaper. Through its windows, one can see there is an electric fan fixed besides its dashboard, so in all likelihood this vehicle is not air-conditioned. Despite the cheap look, the car’s body is made of aluminum alloy rather than plastic – as the dent at the tail shows.
But if you share the utilitarian mindsets of many Chinese pensioners, the question you would be asking yourself when seeing one of those is what a real car can do that this cutie can’t? Fact is that it can do almost everything a real car is capable of, given that your daily activities don’t stray too much off a thirty-mile radius from home and rushing heart attack patients to hospitals is not one of them.
Then you get the bonus. This car doesn’t have a number plate. Actually, you don’t even need a driver’s license to drive an EWRV. Exploiting the law that didn’t foresee the fast advancement of technology, these cars are equipped with small enough engines so they are not “automobiles” in the legal sense of the word. If you can put up with its short range and low speed, the tradeoff is that you will not need to worry about parking tickets – at least for now. On the flipside, you can’t insure them, so keep in mind: never, ever get into an accident.
I checked on Taobao for pricing and found a similar enough model, brand-named SIMATE (Yes, even its name sounds like Smart), which has a price starting from 8000 yuan without battery. Battery packs need to be paid separately and different options are available. The highest spec model, which claims to be capable of running 130 km on one charge, is priced at 14000 yuan per unit (including the car and battery), roughly the price of a MacBook Pro Retina. The sales figure indicates that 29 units of SIMATEs have been sold over the past month. Remember there are hundreds of vendors on Taobao and there are probably more physical shops offline. If this is any indication at all, then it is that the demand for EVs in the Middle Kingdom is enormous, and a manufacturer can be successful, provided their products are cheap enough and "Smart" enough.
