okay so I feel like electric car fans have been very patiently waiting for this dream of the $25,000 brand new electric car like the affordable for the masses EV that everyone can finally get without even thinking twice and the more I thought about it and the more options that I've seen as we get lower and lower in prices over time The more I've started to wonder if this is even possible and there's a bunch of math behind why I've been wondering this first of all batteries are the most expensive part of any electric car and so if you want to shave cost you shave battery but also let's look at what's currently out there right if you if you ask people about this this dream mythical $25,000 car I think a lot of them talk about it as like Tesla Model 2 like a smaller compact version of model 3 the model 3 right now feels like to me that is the bar for the cheapest good electric car and I that's obviously very subjective but I mean like 300 plus miles of range and under $40,000 let's say this is all new cars by the way I know you can get a used EV for less but what about underneath that price like I think ionic 6 would qualify that's also like starting just under $40,000 but then as you keep going lower and lower you get to like the Nissan Leaf the Chevy bolt you get to the konas and the I I tested the Mini Cooper SE I didn't do a video on it but that you know that car has 100 miles of range basically and it's it's just once you go way way down in price you start to run up against just pure economic physics and here's another version of it this is a car I've been testing for about a week now this is the Fiat 500e this car starts at $32,000 starting and it's a new EV and it's got about 140 M of range and uh you can tell it's a pretty comp car and we'll get into the specifics of this car in a second but I see cars like this now and I'm like wait a second not to be pessimistic but like with eventual inflation and with all the things we're trying to do with good EVS maybe we'll just never see a $25,000 new EV with good range maybe we'll see one with 100 200 miles of range but let's look at this car as my example this is $2,000 now again purely subjective I actually love the look of this car and I I don't think it's just because it's red I really think this is a good-looking car so you got the 500 logo on the front you got this little Grill here down at the bottom these little headlights this kind of has mini looks up at the front but as you get to the side it's clearly compact right and we know that this Baseline cheap electric car is going to have to be compact so this is a twodo and to be honest the driver's seat very spacious I just wouldn't wish this back seat on anyone uh we get to the back here this is where you charge the thing pop that open you can see it's a CCS Port it's not nacs but again it's a Fiat so there's the back of the 500e and here look there's there's trunk space check this out that's a trunk that's a real trunk behind the back seats there that's not a joke of a junk that's actually storage space so you're going to have to nail the fundamentals just to have a car that people are willing to buy in general and uh it's fundamentally more spacious than you'd think but the thing about trying to minimize costs on a car in general is you have to use cheaper materials even if you build it really well inside and out to minimize cost you have to use cheap materials right off the bat smaller Wheels but let's get inside this car real quick I'll show you what it looks like inside a $32,000 car even though it's got the interior of something that might cost even less I almost made this video about about the Kia Nero I had the the Kia Nero also for a couple weeks and I was going to call it something like the problem with cheap electric cars is because the interior feels like something cheaper because it's sitting on top of an expensive battery that bumps the base price up so you've gone through all the work of minimizing the cost of price in this car and here's what you end up with right okay this is the Fiat this is the steering wheel by the way power button totally fine when you minimize cost in a car you tend to minimize computers and screens so you've got this one screen in the middle here there's no carplay there's no Android auto you get this screen back here behind the steering wheel also pretty small kind of feels like the mini and then everywhere else it's like all right there's fabric up here there's plastic All Around Here There is a good amount of space in storage and even a little cup holder that pops down here which I think is a nice clever use of space but in general it's it's felt it's fabric not really a whole lot and this Dash here I mean the red is nice because it matches the outside of the car and I like the design of it but again it's it's plastic you're sitting in a a lot of plastic for a $32,000 car now funny enough one of the upsides of this car is you do have a lot more of these buttons because there's less happening on the computer computer still does a good amount of stuff you can connect your phone to it it'll show you your consumption and there's no one pedal driving but when you hit the brakes you can see how much regen you're getting on that little dial right there but there's also so like a bunch of regular AC buttons there is a wireless charging pad for your phone right there one usba a port and then of course you can lock the car and hit your hazards those are all regular buttons I've also noticed there is no mirror here I actually don't think that's that big of a cost there's there's a regular mirror over here and none there but okay then you want to get into the back seat so let's explore that let's get let's I'm going to do this for you guys I'm going to get into the back seat of the Fiat 500 e yes it's still on it gets annoyed when I get out even though I haven't hit the power button okay pop this back here I do this for the videos okay so this is the 63 driving position that I just described and this is my current leg room situation matter of fact I could probably spread out across the back seat sideways like this um but it's not ideal I have also sat in the back seat of my own Porsche 911 once just to say I did it and uh it was a lot like this this was a tiny bit more room but this isn't made to have a bunch of people in the back seats there's no screen back here no ports back here no footwell room this is just uh it exists for maybe some kids once in a while so if you end up with this car that I just showed you for $32,000 how do you go about making this car even cheaper to get it down to $225,000 I mean it's already it's already this sorry I I didn't hit the power button I I do get annoyed by that personally but yeah okay fine there you go how do you make this car $25,000 that's my question do you make it even smaller do you make it a total twood door and ignore the back seats completely do you remove even more things do you take out even more materials do you do you make the wheels even smaller do you make the battery even smaller because again as of right now it's not the most powerful car in the world but it's it's got the electric torque it's Zippy it'll get you 0 to 60 in like 7 seconds it's fine it's even got these little design details from Fiat that make it feel special it's it's a solid car but you got to get $7,000 off of this price you really got to cut a lot and as of right now battery being the most expensive thing this car currently has a pretty small battery that gets at 140 Mi of range so you're going to dramatically cut into the 140 mies of range so I feel like you get where I'm going with this I wonder if the $25,000 electric car dream is even possible I mean obviously right now it doesn't exist so we could argue it's impossible right now but will it ever exist will we ever get batteries that are so good and so battery energy dense and so cheap that we can sell cars for $25,000 and will we get there before inflation means we don't have that as the price I don't know I tend to think that yes we will eventually get to the goal of sustainable electric cars for everyone but I think the bar for what that price tag is is just going to slowly creep up over time and I do remember like that first interview that I did with Elon on video where I asked about the the grandm plan and eventually getting to a cheap $25,000 car and that must have been about a decade ago and that seemed realistic 25,000 at the time but I don't know I'm super curious what you guys think and I'll listen in the comments and talk to you guys I'm sure you all know much more than me about this stuff but what do you think will we ever get a $25,000 electric car for brand new thanks for watching catch you in the next one peace
