I really wish Robert from Aging Wheels did a review of the e.Go Life. You never heard of Aging Wheels? He does Youtube videos about weird cars.
You never heard about the e.Go Life? It's this:
A small electric car built by a start-up company in Aachen, Germany, where I live. These pictures were taken at their factory, actually. The company recently filed for its second bankruptcy, and literally nobody believes that they'll ever make cars again. It's closely related to Streetscooter, a company that built electric vans for the German postal service, but that's a whole other story.
The e.Go Life is right within the Aging Wheelhouse. Now, I strongly believe that this video will never happen. For one, I don't think anyone's ever been stupid enough to bring one of those to the US, and I think it's honestly not that interesting compared to the even smaller home-built things he usually (for some definition of "usually") he reviews. They built a four-digit number of them, after all (around 1350), so it's almost mainstream.
Small City Car
In a wider sense I think it's interesting to talk about the idea of the small electric city car. For decades now, people have been telling us that we should buy small electric city cars; cars that can cover 90-95% of our driving, and rent cars or (in Europe) take the train for longer distances. And this has never worked out, people just don't buy these cars. Why is that?
Well, first reason is because they all cost way too much, obviously. They cost too much because they're built in low numbers, and with low numbers of sales there isn't the money to get the degree of production scale and automation necessary to get the price down.
e.Go (and Streetscooter) claimed to solve that issue with their special production method, and in fact both projects were born out of the production systems chair at the local RWTH Aachen University. Certainly some impressive stuff. They had their own local 5G network in the factory for network-enabled torque wrenches, which they were very proud of.
History
Perhaps a good time to mention the history and relationships here: Streetscooter was originally set up to build a small electric city car. Here's a prototype in 2013.
Then they also designed a small electric delivery van. Then the German Post/DHL wanted small electric delivery vans, and unlike, say, the stupid stuff the USPS is doing, they actually did something about it, bought Streetscooter, and turned it into a real company. I think they built about 15,000 so far, most for the German Post but also some for third parties. Then the German Post got new management which found that the economics were not as rosy as they thought, they tried to sell the company, the new owner declared bankruptcy, right now the professor who founded this is back in charge, and I have no idea whether any production is actually happening anymore.
e.Go was then set up by the people that founded Streetscooter to build a small electric city car, seemingly going back to the original vision (although the specific story of how they came to the e.Go Life in its modern form is a bit convoluted as well. Apparently JIRA boards were involved). Both companies were founded in and produced in Aachen, Streetscooter at the old Talbot train factory (unrelated to any car company ever named Talbot), e.Go in a newly built factory. They're also both unified by being based around new innovative production methods that allow you to build cars, even in small runs, more efficiently and cheaply than the big manufacturers with all their steel presses and what have you.
Except not. Neither e.Go nor the much more successful Streetscooter ever managed to build as many vehicles per year as planned, and the prices were also by no means exceptionally low. The promise of better production methods just couldn't be kept. The professor who started it all keeps complaining about how German government and German post aren't doing enough to support small new promising car manufacturers, but there have been people arguing that he knew what the conditions were, his promises were just too bold. Impossible for me to say from the outside, but that doesn't sound all wrong.
So, production costs are an issue, and e.Go didn't solve it. But I think that hits at most 50% of the issue.
City Car is an oxymoron
I think there's not actually a market for a city car, and you can reach that conclusion from multiple directions.
The first is that cars don't actually make much sense in the city, and making the car smaller doesn't change that a lot. Mercedes used to talk big about their Smart car, but the reality is that the best Mercedes for city driving is the biggest and most expensive one:
You have no issue with parking spaces because it doesn't need to park, it just leaves when you're done with it, and when you need it again, it appears within fifteen minutes or so. You don't need to pay attention to traffic, a professional paid driver will do that for you. The one in this picture is even electric.
Our cities are full with cars, and it's making everyone miserable, including the people who drive cars. They are constantly complaining that there aren't enough roads and parking spaces and too many traffic lights everywhere. Say what you will about the e.Go Life, but at the end of the day, it's still a car. Maybe it takes up 60% of the size of a normal car, and it fits in the special extra-short parking spaces in some of Aachen's absolutely bizarre parking garages, but at the end of the day, still a car. Together with safety margins, it takes up maybe one or two meters less road, big whoop. You definitely won't fit two of these into one parking space. Its advantage over a regular car is, at best, cheap and electric.
So if you don't particularly like cars, this one won't change your mind. Bus, bike, e-bike, cargo bike, scooter and who knows, maybe even a tram in the future, are all solutions that are much cheaper and in many ways more useful for getting around the city.
On the other hand, if you do like cars and do like driving into city centres, this offers basically no advantages over a normal full-size car. The only thing you can say is that by being small, it offers electric at a reasonable price, but as we saw, that's very debatable.
The 90% car
The standard statement about a small electric city car has always been that it does 90% of what you need a car to do, or more precisely, more than 90% of all car trips, and surely you can make do with that. And I think that's true, to an extent: Many people could make do. They just don't want to.
The folks who still believe in the idea that a car is freedom are not interested in a 90% car, because the extra 10% are arguably when a car is at its most useful. Being able to drive to my parents 500 kilometres away right now with no planning, no seat reservation, only stopping for fuel, is useful. For me personally, that's way more useful than using it to go shopping or to work, both things where I can do very well without it.
The folks who don't buy into car ideology and are open to more efficient and ecological options for local travel, well, they already have these options in the form of public transit, e-Bikes and so on.
The "city car" is really only an option for people who depend on a car for every-day travel because there are no good public transit options, but who have other options for the few cases where they need to do something interesting. The ideal place for such a car is as a third or fourth car for a family living in suburbia. As every fellow train and urbanism enthusiast knows, that's not actually something we should encourage, as a society, even though we keep doing it. That aside, perhaps a suburban car for that market could make money, if it was sold at a low price, but nobody's managing that. A normal-sized car that gives you the option of long-distance travel if you need it just seems more appealing if both cost the same.
And of course nowadays we have electric cars that have reasonable long-distance ranges. The era of the small electric city car was over before it even started. e.Go never had a chance and on the whole, it won't be missed. The solution to our problem isn't more cars, not even relatively small ones.
(All pictures © me, you can use them under CC-BY-SA)
