VW Really Wants Affordable EVs

If you’ve gone shopping for an electric car lately, and you don’t make the big bucks, you know they’re really not cheap at all. Battery tech is one of the really big cost hang-ups, but Volkswagen thinks it can overcome these challenges and truly make electric cars for the masses.

Green Car Reports cited an event in Germany with VW where executives spoke about the next-gen EVs, saying the company wants electric vehicles “for millions, not millionaires.”

Just how expensive are the upcoming crop of VW EVs going to be? About the cost of its old TDI offerings, which weren’t pricey at all. Volkswagen is huge and has considerable resources, plus it’s showing quite the commitment to electric vehicle tech. Leveraging economies of scale, it could do what everyone else has so far pretty much failed to do: make affordable EVs that don’t have pathetic range. Sorry, Nissan Leaf.

You can’t expect everyone to get excited about trying EVs if they’re all super expensive. After all, the current Kia Soul EV starts at about $34,000, which is quite the jump over the rest of the Soul lineup.

The first of this new wave of Volkswagen EVs will arrive in 2020, so we’ll see how affordable they’ll really be.