German Startup e.Go Mobile Is Building A Truly Affordable EV

There is a company in Germany called e.Go Mobile that will soon start making an electric vehicle for half the price of the cheapest Tesla Model 3.

Chances are you haven’t heard of it yet but it has big potential to be in the news in the near future. That’s because it focuses on making affordable electric cars, something other companies haven’t quite managed to pull off — except for some Chinese automakers that haven’t begun exporting cars outside their home market yet.

e.Go Mobile has been founded by professor Günther Schuh, the man behind Europe’s best-selling electric van — the StreetScooter sold to Deutsche Post in 2014. That sale gave him the capital needed to start e.Go Mobile, with German auto supplier ZF Friedrichshafen later investing €135 million (around $154 million) in the company as part of a project to jointly develop a self-driving minibus.

e.Go’s first model is called the Life and is a no-frills city car that offers four-seats inside a slightly shorter bodywork than the Fiat 500‘s and is available in three different battery configurations. The base e.Go Life 20 packs a 14.9 kWh battery that feeds a 20 kW (27 hp) electric motor for an NEDC-measured range of 121 km (75 miles). This version starts from €15,900 ($18,160) in Germany.

The e.Go Life 40 uses 12.1 kWh battery and a 40 kW (54 hp) motor for a driving range of 142 km (88 miles) and a €17,400 ($19,880) starting price. Finally, the e.Go Life 60 packs a 12.5 kWh battery and a 60 kW (80 hp) motor and offers a range of 184 km (114 miles) for a base price of €19,900 ($22,740).

The company says it already has 3,200 pre-orders for the e.Go Life electric city car and isn’t taking more before it starts production. Bloomberg reports manufacturing will begin in March 2019 at the Aachen plant, with deliveries expected to begin the following month. If everything goes according to plan, by 2022 e.Go Mobile will build 100,000 vehicles a year — as many as Tesla made in 2017.