There is some tension in the Fiat group over the production of Fiat 500 EV electric minicars, it seems. While CEO Sergio Marchionne predicts that for every sale of a Fiat 500 EV, Chrysler would make a $10,000 loss. Despite that figure, the company is pushing ahead with the Chrysler-built Fiat electric car, to debut in the US in 2012.
Meanwhile, Fiat Chairman John Elkann has said that electric cars get unfair coverage in the media, when compared to the actual proportion of those vehicles on the market. It would seem that this kind of excessive focus is contributing to the pressure automakers feel to build electric vehicles, despite them being economically unviable.
It seems a kind of phantom competition has been constructed over electric cars, with manufacturers racing to compete and provide alternatives, without getting any real returns. On the 10,000-dollar loss of each Fiat 500 EV, Sergio Marchionne says:
The economics of EVs simply don’t work. On the 500 that (Chrysler) will begin selling in the U.S. next year, we will lose over $10,000 (per unit) despite the retail price being three times higher.
As Luca Ciferri writes in Automotive News, the whole electric car debate seems more like a popularity contest, and is set-up in such a way that consumers will buy their favourite brand’s electric alternative without it actually providing a real substitute to a fuel-powered car. At the simplest level, an electric vehicle generally costs an awful lot more but won’t go the distance… literally. When put like that, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
After Fiat has been developing some very impressive technology on the engine front, including its Multiair and TwinAir units, John Elkann’s lament about the focus on electric vehicles is understandable. He says:
There are 900 million vehicles with internal combustion engine vehicles in the world and less than 100,000 EVs, but I do not see this proportion reflected in the global media coverage of the automotive sector.
