I paid the factory in China US $1,080 but wound up with around a US $4,500 lighter bank account by the time the boat slipped into a Florida pond.Īnd that was for a private import. I did the same thing with a five-seater electric boat. A couple of summers ago, I paid a Chinese factory US $2,000 for a much lower spec (5 horsepower, 25 mph) electric mini-truck.īy the time it was all said and done, I had paid an additional US $6,000 or so in freight charges, import duties, US taxes and tariffs, US customs fees, trucking, and other expenses to get it into my family’s driveway in Florida. The only way you could buy one of these vehicles for approximately US $14,000 is if you did it in China, which is what I did once. As anyone who reads my long-running weekly column Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week will already know, Chinese vehicle prices don’t translate very well into US prices. But that doesn’t make this a US $14,000 vehicle. Sure, ¥100,000 is approximately equal to US $14,000 at current exchange rates. It is based on a similar SUV-format vehicle that itself has only been estimated to launch at 100,000 Chinese Yuan later this summer. First of all, no one knows what the price tag will be for the Baojun Yepp EV truck when it eventually launches. It’s less of a GM vehicle and more of a partially paid-for-by-GM vehicle. That vehicle, the Baojun Yep EV, is technically “GM-backed,” thanks to a joint venture between General Motors and the two state-owned Chinese automotive companies SAIC Motor and Liuzhou Wuling Motors. And second of all, it doesn’t cost US $14,000. Take the US $14,000 GM mini-truck above, for example. Most of the time, these stories are misleading for a few reasons. Just don’t start taking out your checkbook when you hear about many of the new mini e-truck models swirling around in the news. But for around-the-town jobs, it’d be plenty. Obviously, it’s not meant to tow a Boston Whaler down the highway. Despite being smaller than a tiny Fiat 500 subcompact city car, it features a 50 kw (67 horsepower) electric motor, a top speed of 100 km/h (62 mph) and a city range of nearly 300 km (188 miles) per charge. The most recent model making headlines, the GM-backed Baojun Yep EV, even offers some fairly respectable performance numbers. Mini-trucks, and especially electric mini-trucks, are incredibly useful and highly efficient machines, though the best part about these fun little utility vehicles is likely their low prices compared to pricier electric pickup trucks. I’m a proud owner of one, and I love the thing. That’s not to say that electric mini-trucks aren’t an exciting new field. There’s been a lot of fuss about the supposed “$14,000 GM electric mini-truck” recently, but you probably shouldn’t get too worked up about it.
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