I was going to make the title of this article a pun with the name of this, China’s first electric supercar. It’s called the Qiantu K50 Event!, and you will forgive me if I excersize a lot of caution on its claims. But you see, I had a Chinese knockoff iPod once.
It was rather a long time ago and I was a cash-strapped guy that wanted something that was above my means, not much has changed really if I’m honest. I could’ve gone for a more traditional non-Apple MP3 player for less money but I really really wanted an iPod and I would settle for nothing less. That is of course until the rationalization bit of my brain kicked in. You see, it said, ‘it needn’t necessarily be an iPod, just something that looks very similar to one. Suddenly a lot of options from no-name brands coming from no-name factories somewhere deep in Heilongjiang made sense. I finally decided on one that could actually play videos as an added bonus. And all for a fraction of what buying a proper one could’ve cost me. Success. I’d never had an MP3 player before and now I had one that could go toe to toe with the best ones out there.
If you’ve ever had one of these knockoff iDevices you know how the rest of the story goes. When it said it could play videos it could play them on a strange, non-decipherable format known only in Heilongjiang and that needed a converter that was in a Mini-CD I was absolutely sure was going to break the disc drive of my old computer. And when I had finally gotten a converter from a particularly shady website I discovered that no matter how much I fiddled with the settings it seemed to be locked on “Interlaced to hell”. Which is as well because trying to watch a video on a 2” screen causes a considerable strain on the ‘ol peepers. I should know, I read a considerable amount of books on a Nokia 5800 screen and it was a lot easier than watching a movie on this thing.
Not that you could watch a full movie of course, because after about 20 minutes of watching video it would start screaming at you to plug it to a main. It did that all the while emanating so much heat that you’d wonder if it wasn’t actually filled with a bunch of little mini vacuum tubes.
What? Oh yes, the car! The Chinese really have come a long way with their car designs but they’re still struggling with original car designs. The Event! looks like they glued the front end of a Lamborghini Huracan and the back end of a slightly crushed Porsche (or a BMW i8) to the body of a Bugatti Veyron that was left in the oven a bit too long. Truth be told it shouldn’t work, but it does. All right, some of the details in the side are still iffy. At least they’re trying to make a striking design, even if it involves cribbing from others, and at least it’s not a complete ripoff of a single car. They’re diversifying their copies.
The interior actually looks superb, there’s no punchline in that sentence. It really looks the business. Okay, not a big fan of the enormous dragonfly in the steering wheel and it seems to be mostly made out of the parts bins of anyone that has ever built a car. But it looks straightforward. It has physical buttons! I shouldn’t be excited that a car has physical buttons, but here we are.
CH-Auto claims that the Event! is powered by a couple of electric motors that produce about 400 horsepower and 0-60 in four seconds and it has a battery pack that should give you 150 miles of range (but not at the same time.) Price? A cool $115,000 before incentives, of which there should be quite a lot in China. The main question regarding this car would be durability: will that nice interior be cracked and shattered in a couple of years [weeks – Ed.]? Will the batteries degrade predictably over time or will you simply wake up one morning to find it says you have three miles of range? And should that happen how much would it cost to fit another battery pack in there? Will the company still be up and running by then? A $115,000 paperweight is still a paperweight.
I’d leave those concerns to the Chinese people that can afford a new electric supercar. Hopefully it was better built than my iNot, which displayed some Apple-like characteristics a week after purchasing it when I put it on my back pocket only to take it out bent and cracked.
Outsider’s Perspective: So about the Chinese electric supercar
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What kind of incentives do they have, really? I thought Nissan just complained about the lack of incentives so they sit on lots of unsold Leafs; while Tesla is happy to sell 360 S’s in the entire country. That said, domestic car makers might receive a different kind of attention.
The looks of the Event! are gorgeous at least.-
Nissan is about to have lots full of unsold Leafs in Georgia. A $5,000 tax incentive expires July 1, 2015. A 24 month lease was running about $279, making the actual cost about $70/month, not counting the gas savings. So basically free or a little less.
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Interesting. The massive incentives in Norway are probably running out, too. 50000 electric cars have been sold, which triggers a political re-evaluation of the incentives. My guess is that goodies like free parking and bus lane usage will go first.
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If the leaf had 50 miles more range I would have bought one already. You can get a 2013 with low mileage for under 13k.
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That’s pretty severe depreciation on a 2 year old car, over 60%. They sticker for $32k. I wonder if the batteries loose range as they age, sort of like crappy cell phone batteries.
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I haven’t seen that complaint, but I think they just underestimated how much people actually drive. 80 miles a day is kind of a drop in the bucket.
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Then again, you can find volts with sub 50k miles for mid teens, maybe people just aren’t digging it.
I’ve definitely considered a volt too, 4x less spent on gas in my commuter would be pretty nice if I could figure out a way to have low payments too. -
I’m a much bigger fan of the plug in hybrid concept (why hasn’t anyone done this with a diesel?!?!), but I could get by on 80 miles/day 95% of the time, and I would know in advance if I couldn’t 99.999% of the time and just take another car. My drive to work is ~13miles each way + < 10 miles driving at lunch. It would work for short weekend trips, just not the longer ones.
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I’m at 30ish each way depending on the roads I pick that morning and afternoon but most of it is in traffic so those 30 miles would be nerve racking.
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Yes, the batteries deteriorate. How fast this occurs depends on how they were used, and where. This makes purchasing a used Leaf (or any pure EV) a bit problematic as you cannot know how or where it was used.
http://www.electricvehiclewiki.com/Battery_Capacity_Loss
Perhaps batteries are warranted on a pro-rata basis, even for second users, which would help… But I don’t know about the various warranty programs. Can anyone help ?
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Is it just the angle of the photo, or does it really not have any pedals for the driver? I feel like I should at least see the accelerator in there.
Counterpoint to your Chinese MP3 player.
http://atomictoasters.com/2012/05/the-30-cell-phone-impressively-modest/
As an update, I took it to Europe for 2 weeks the following year, still have the phone, and still use it now and again.
http://atomictoasters.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/IMG_8584.png
Then again, that iPod Nano you so much wanted was made in China, too. They can if they really want and if someone helps with tech. Not sure how this car was born.
I btw. had Nokia 5800, right after iPhone 3G, what an catastrophic step back that was. I didn’t like iphone because it felt so damn big. 5800 was much smaller and lighter but it was Nokia’s dark ages and both OS and hardware (screen!) were quite crappy IMO. After 3 months of pain I got myself HTC Legend and was very happy for a long time.
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