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Kandi K27 electric car available in California for $7,999 after rebates
- Waterluvian 6y agoA Chinese car being street legal in North America seems like a landmark moment. Or am I confusing "legal" with "safe"?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Rebelgecko 6y agoWorth noting that it's a promo price only for the first 1000 purchased
- jungletime 6y agoStill too expensive and too wimpy looking. Make it look like a death machine with razor bladed spinning rotors ready for civil war. And burgers would buy.
- elihu 6y agoThe K23 looks a bit better in my opinion. It's not like something you'd expect to see in a Mad Max movie, but at least I think it looks cooler than the first-generation Leaf that it's competing with.
- bradlys 6y agoTop speed of 68mph (EDIT: might actually be 63mph?). Basically a fast golf cart as far as the US is concerned. Who buys cars like this in the US? Is there a sizable market for cars that can’t even drive on the freeway?
- sp332 6y agoYeah. In Europe they have "city cars" with different standards for impact safety, so they can be smaller and lighter. In America, we mostly have full-on regulations for even the smallest cars, and then a category of vehicles limited to 25 MPH, which are hardly regulated at all.
- jacobush 6y agoI never heard of this, where in Europe?
- stragulus 6y agoI know in the Netherlands they have these little 'cars', that are essentially mopeds with a roof slapped onto them. They are speed-limited to 30mph and crash safety is on par with what you'd expect from a moped. You can drive these with a moped license (easy and early to get). You can only drive on roads limited to 50mph (most state roads and inner city roads). I'm not sure why this is allowed as these things are noisy, unsafe, and hold up all other traffic. And they are not limited to disabled people either, anyone can drive these. They used to look terrible and nobody wanted to drive them, but since they don't require a full driver's license and are not taxed annually, they have become more popular, and now look mostly like regular cars. Search for 'brommobiel' or 'mini car' to get some examples. What the law intended: https://alleverzekeringenopeenrij.nl/wp-content/uploads/brommobiel-verzekeren.jpg https://alleverzekeringenopeenrij.nl/wp-content/uploads/brom... What you can actually buy: https://media2.autokopen.nl/auto/brommobiel-aixam-crossline-7305185-1-640.jpg https://media2.autokopen.nl/auto/brommobiel-aixam-crossline-... That last 'car' has a whopping 8 hp.
- sp332 6y agoI saw a lot of these in Paris. https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a15345640/an-aixam-to-grind-a-sub-class-of-tiny-french-cars-that-caters-to-drunks-the-elderly-and-kids/ https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a15345640/an-aixam-to-grin... This is not the same as the "A-segment" cars that are usually called "city cars", so I probably got some terms confused.
- jhbadger 6y agoIn California, where this targeted, the maximum legal speed even on a freeway is 70mph.
- strawberrypuree 6y agoGoing that slow on, say, 101 south of San Jose w/no traffic would get you honked at, flipped the bird, or worse.
- Dylan16807 6y agoIf the road is wide open, and I'm in the right lane minding the speed limit, anyone that gets mad at my speed clearly deserves it.
- abawany 6y agoSometimes they end up passing the pain on to the law abiding driver: https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1326755485610020864 https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1326755485610020864 .
- Dylan16807 6y agoI feel like that example could have hit someone going 90 just as easily.
- harikb 6y agoThat may be true, but the minimum speed before you are honked at from the car behind is about 60. That also matters.
- yellowapple 6y agoOnly if you're in the left lane, which you shouldn't be unless you're, you know, actually passing someone. Basically, just pretend you're driving a really tiny semi and you're good to go.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoThat would cover about 99% of what I use a car for. Worst case I just rent for the other 1%.
- Polylactic_acid 6y agoIt would also cover 100% of legal speeds in my state. More than good enough for me and pretty much everyone assuming it works well at its top speed.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- adrianpike 6y agoYeah, I live in a small town in the far northwest of the country. Nearest true freeway is either 100 miles or a ferry ride away. A surprising number people in town drive things like this.
- WalterBright 6y agoMy dad had a VW camper bus with a top speed of 65. It took a while to get there. I learned to drive with it. It was quite a challenge to pass other cars on a 2 lane blacktop. The trick was to back off about a quarter mile, then floor it. By the time you reached the passee, you hit 65 and could swerve into the left lane then back again. If you were unfortunate enough to get an oncoming car in the meantime, you stomped on the brake, slid back the quarter mile, and tried again. The bus was also highly susceptible to crosswinds. Going in and out of cuts in a crosswind could blow you into the other lane. Had to anticipate that with the steering wheel. Eventually my dad decided to sell it, and I took care of that for him. He asked me if I missed the bus, and I said no, I thought it was a minor miracle we never died in a crash in it. I understand the nostalgia for those cars, but they belong in a museum, not on the road.
- cafard 6y agoA neighbor drives a "smart car" for errands around Washington, DC. I'm sure that isn't what she takes to New York City or Virginia Beach. I don't know how fast it is, but I would be uncomfortable in a car that size on the interstate.
- JKCalhoun 6y agoPeople pay $3K for electric bikes that clearly never enter a freeway. So I would say yes.
- rebuilder 6y agoIt also has a 17 kWh battery, so the range is limited to something like 80 miles. This is a city car.
- reaperducer 6y agoWho buys cars like this in the US? Retirees. People who don't ever drive on a highway. It's perfect for a second car, or a commuter car. Is there a sizable market for cars that can’t even drive on the freeway? Yes. In fact, there's even a huge market for luxury golf carts that people drive around retirement villages. Most people don't realize that some retirement villages are larger and have more people than many cities. There was a pretty good article about it in the New York Times not too long ago. Some place in Florida that was profiled had some crazy number of residents like 50,000 or some similarly surprising number. They'd also be good for fleet operations. How fast does an urban delivery vehicle need to go? Or a water company fleet? Or any number of maids, plumbers, HVAC guys, or other service industries?
- donretag 6y ago"bans the sale of new gas cars and trucks by 2035" I still do not see how they can role out charging infrastructure in just 15 years. Not everyone lives in a house. I was in San Luis Obispo last December and the backup on I5 forced cars off the road. The wait at the Tesla charging station was 4-6 hours. Getting back to the article. I'm liking the car. I would look into getting one if I owned a place where I could charge it.
- bradlys 6y agoIt’ll get repealed. All bans like that either have large cutouts or easy ways to get out of them. It’s posturing.
- qppo 6y agoIt's a lot easier to roll out charging stations than gas stations, and it's already fairly well established in the urban areas where people don't live in homes. I think it's entirely realistic to have more charging ports in California than gas nozzles by 2030 if not 2025.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoWhy gas stations vs any other commerical location? Chargers are more popular and useful in parking spots.
- epistasis 6y agoElectricity is everywhere. Deployment of charging infrastructure is going to be trivial, especially in parking lots with existing light poles. That's not to say there won't be growing pains, but we will deploy. Over the course of 2015 I went from always being able to find a charger to not being able to ever find one, and then since 2017 I haven't had a single problem because more chargers were added. For a couple years, I lived in an apartment where the landlord was a dock and wouldn't let me install a charger at the car port, and I had to charge at public chargers. It worked out, even though it wasn't ideal. And when the laws finally reign in the rapacious landlords, we will have plenty of charging at apartments too.
- coding123 6y agoYou really need to buy a large vehicle to avoid being mince meat.
- bluGill 6y agoDepends. My commute was all city streets - max 30mph. much less dangerous. (or course I walked to took the bus, but this would be an option if I needed to avoid the disadvantages of those)
- dvdbloc 6y agoYou can buy a used Nissan Leaf for a lot less and arguably a lot better too...
- hardwaresofton 6y agoThis is their real competition in the US -- the Leaf (and it's secondary market) is what I consider my defacto city-and-the-burbs choice. With the new models' ranges it makes quite a dent in the interstate travel band -- the state I was thinking of is Texas -- smaller states even easier)band.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- paxys 6y agoThere is no way you're going to find a Nissan Leaf without major problems for $8k, let alone a lot less than that.
- maxkwallace 6y agoNot true (source: I recently did a bunch of car buying research and a used Leaf was my number 2 choice; ended up not getting it). These are electric drivetrains (simpler transmission, etc.) so there are fewer things that can go wrong relative to an ICE car. Obv range is limited with a used Leaf but that's not a problem for most city trips.
- bradlys 6y agohttps://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/cta?query=nissan+leaf&sort=priceasc&srchType=T&bundleDuplicates=1&auto_title_status=1 https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/cta?query=nissan+leaf&so... I don't know. Seems like there's a lot available for under $8,000. It can't be that all of them are garbage, can it?
- paxys 6y agoAre you really going to trust the battery on a 7-10 year old model?
- kube-system 6y ago> Its electric motor manages only 27 horsepower and the car's top speed is just 63 miles an hour. > K27 takes a while to reach that top speed, Kandi America chief executive Johnny Tai admitted. [...] The K27 is intended to be an urban errand runner, essentially a step or two up from an electric motorbike, he said. > "I don't think that we want to compete with Tesla or anyone," Even the company selling it doesn’t consider this a serious car. The car has not been tested under any US safety tests or EPA range tests. The company claims it has been safety tested in China but wouldn’t provide any documentation. https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/26/success/kandi-10000-electric-car-china/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/26/success/kandi-10000-electric-... This is simply an example of extreme corner cutting.
- elihu 6y agoSo, it's $4,200 in China, but the base price in the US is $17,499, before rebates. That's a pretty big difference; is it because of design changes required to be legal to drive in the U.S., or largely just shipping and tariffs? On their website, they list the bigger K23's battery type as "Ternary lithium" whatever that means. They describe the K27 battery just as "lithium". I wonder what they actually use; is it lithium iron phosphate? Or "regular" NMC lithium-ion? It would be interesting if they use different batteries for the US version and that's a big part of the price difference.
- grecy 6y agoMost goods sold around the world aren't priced in relation to what it costs to make them, they're priced based on what a given market will pay for them. There's a reason it's cheaper to fly from Australia to NYC for a weekend to buy a MBP and fly back than it is to just buy one in Australia. Same reason the top of the line Johnny Walker Whatever label is 1/4 the price in South Africa.
- trinovantes 6y agoI wonder if there's any sites that makes these comparisons e.g. I specify my home country then it lists popular products I can cheaper from elsewhere including cost of travel
- randompwd 6y agoCustoms duty is a thing in most countries. You're only getting it for cheaper by breaking the law (gray area that it may be for some)
- strombofulous 6y agoI thought it was more expensive in Australia because they have really good consumer protection laws so Apple just includes AppleCare in the cost of all their laptops
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
- Hydraulix989 6y agoI thought the federal tax credit expired in 2020?
- known 6y agoThe Most and Least Expensive Cars to Maintain https://archive.is/kNxEm https://archive.is/kNxEm
- known 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_electric_cars_currently_available https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_electric_cars_currentl...
- amdelamar 6y ago59 miles range? That's not going to cut it for most commuters in California.
- xvedejas 6y agoIt won't cut it for the average commuter, but it'd cut it for the median commuter. Really it only needs to cut it for, say, the 10th percentile commuter to have a really big market.
- erik_seaberg 6y agoI’ve changed jobs four times since moving to the bay area in 2006, and none has ever been within thirty miles of the next. If people bet on always having a short commute, I think a lot of them will be sad.
- Gibbon1 6y agoOne of my complaints is California's housing market and zoning makes it difficult for people to relocate close to work. And work to locate close to workers. So instead we have people wasting vast amounts of time and resources commuting. I've probably spent 5000 hours and $100,000 on commuting over the last 30 years. It's all been fundamentally a waste.
- xvedejas 6y agoYou must have very different preferences than what I have. I live about 5 miles from my (former) office in SF, and it was also one of the cheaper options to do so.
- erik_seaberg 6y agoI had a commute like that (from the Mission to Market St.) but they slowly went under and my next job was in the South Bay. I wouldn’t want to hesitate about career opportunities due to the range of my car, after relocating 800 miles from Seattle for my career.
- WalterBright 6y ago"it takes a little longer to charge and gets fewer miles per gallon" I didn't know electrons were measured by the gallon.
- jdmichal 6y agoI always make sure to fill my bathtub before a hurricane in case our power goes out.
- victor9000 6y agoSame here, I love my bathtub turbine!
- SubiculumCode 6y ago$7,999 and they'll promise not to send your location data back to China CCP? /s
- apexalpha 6y agoHow affordable are we talking, you ask? The listed price of the model K27 is $17,499. But once you take into account California’s $2,000 electric vehicle incentive credit and a federal tax credit of $7,500, that leaves you at a total cost of $7,999 (if you live in California). Wow! This kind of deal would be a no-brainer here in my European country as a second car!
- zachrose 6y ago> the order was met with mixed reactions; a senior economist at the Institute for Energy Research pointed out that “Electric cars might not have emissions at a tailpipe, but they do have emissions at the power plant.” > IER is often described as a "front" for the fossil fuel industry; it was initially formed by Charles Koch, receives donations from many large companies like Exxon, and publishes a stream of reports and position papers opposing any efforts to control greenhouse gasses. Thomas Pyle, president of the IER and its offshoot American Energy Alliance (AEA), was appointed to the US Department of Energy's transition team after the 2016 United States elections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Energy_Research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Energy_Research
- JKCalhoun 6y agoYeah, no kidding. My first reaction was, "Has this guy not heard about solar and wind energy?" I guess so.
- mschuster91 6y ago> but they do have emissions at the power plant While objectively true and ignoring the fact of renewable energies that a sibling comment pointed out... power plants are cleaner than cars, even when one were to burn the same fuel - simply because modern power plants have enormously powerful particulate filters and other exhaust post-processing: fine-particulate removal using high voltage, "gas washing" to get rid of sulphur, afterburning to get rid of dioxines and other nasty compounds...
- reaperducer 6y ago
- sgt 6y agoI wonder if it's cost effective to import the motor or equivalent electric motor and battery packs from China through something like AliExpress and build a DIY electric car for fun. I am thinking some donor car like an old E30 and not something new, as then I bet it can get quite complicated quick. Anyone on HN doing an EV conversion?
- rbanffy 6y agoThere are many conversion kits you can fit in a car in the place of an internal combustion engine. I haven't seen any that gets rid of all the transmission, however. It's a sad thing to have an electric motor saddled by a gearbox and even worse when it's a manual gearbox.
- Unklejoe 6y ago> saddled by a gearbox and even worse when it's a manual gearbox Couldn't you just leave it in like 3rd gear all the time or something?
- rbanffy 6y agoNot sure 3rd would be able to take the full torque.
- mrguyorama 6y agoWhat manual transmission are you thinking of that can't take a few hundred foot pounds of torque?
- spodek 6y agoI predicted based on what people are throwing away that cars will become disposable and landfills will fill up with them https://joshuaspodek.com/prediction-cars-will-become-disposable https://joshuaspodek.com/prediction-cars-will-become-disposa.... We keep not thinking of the unintended side effects so I hope we consider the end of life for these things. I suspect plenty of externalities aren't factored into the cost that the public will have to bare.
- olivermarks 6y agoI won't be buying a Chinese car, regardless of power source. Separately Governor Newsom's autocratic proclamations about what he wants to happen in 2035 carry no weight - the next governor may change that edict as has happened many times before. California (where I live) needs to get serious about its electricity grid, which is currently 3rd world quality, so those that want to run electric powered vehicles can do so safely. Right now if there is a strong wind the grid is turned off in case the power lines blow over and start a fire in all the dry vegetation that is no longer managed by the state, exacerbated by tree disease. We can't currently escape from those fires in electric vehicles. I'd like to see a massive investment in roads (tires and road degradation create enormous pollution) and the electricity grid, especially given that natural gas is now banned in all new houses, restaurants and businesses.