Overview:
Electric Vehicles are a key part of our tomorrow and how we get there. If we can get all the fossil fuel vehicles off our roads, out of our seas and out of our skies, we'll have a much better environment. This community is where we discuss the various different vehicles and news stories regarding electric transportation.
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Finally a car you can drive for people who don't have to compensate for some weird issues.
$8-9k, 32 mph top speed, intended as urban transport
It's a decent start, and more importantly it is a start. Being brutally honest it's a pretty minimal urban commute vehicle. The old 2013 Leaf I just bought for $4500 gets the same mileage with its used battery, and can go 90mph, OTOH the Olinia seats 6. Kudos for getting the ball rolling. It will only improve from here.
Being brutally honest it’s a pretty minimal urban commute vehicle
Oh no, Mexican engineers ended up making exactly what they sought out to make.
Sure, let's compare a 13 year old used car to a new vehicle for value.
It's fair to consider the inventory of used cars (and used car prices) when evaluating the universe of mobility options.
This thing is basically an ultra premium electric golf cart. It will serve certain purposes far better than a Nissan Leaf, and some purposes significantly worse. Same with comparing it to a cargo e-bike capable of hauling kids in the back.
And maybe it will have enough adoption (and associated network of parts, knowledge base for maintenance and repair) to where a 10-year-old example sitting out in the world in 2036 will serve as an affordable option for someone else in that particular moment.
It's unfair to compare Mexico's EV industry plans to Japan's EV industry plans from 20 years ago.
They need to lean into the irony and have the horn default to La Cucaracha.
Oh, snap! They're working on a truck variant, coming soon! https://www.olinia.auto/olinia-cargo
I've been thinking of getting a van...
And the dashboard has physical buttons!
I really really hope its just a normal bare-bones car which doesnt listen to your converstations or track your driving or have a kill switch or require firmware updates. If its just machinery intented for driving without burning fossil fuels, I will almost definitely try to buy one
Mexican..... Y para que es este boton con laletra D?
Other Mexican..... En mi troka le pones la D y jala bien. No seas pendejo! La de es para moverse.
First Mexican... A okay. Entendido y anotado!
Debating what the D on their Mexican made car is for.
D de donducir
Que haces?...
Aqui nomas donduciendo mi carro.
La C es de....
I had a dream I saw one of these irl..
I'm a sucker for microvans. I had a 64' ford econoline. I had a 71 and a 74 vanagon.
I moved onto EV's a few years ago, and now can't go back. I had a deposit down on a Canoo. I don't like the VW id. This lil' tucker seems to capture the spirit of the microvan FAR better than anything else I've seen to date.
430 miles with max payload. ID buzz is overpriced and not very practical.
Yeah its just ..
It's not very cute 😡
And I want it more microvan style. Like I want to have a huge amount of windows and sit far forwards in the cockpit.
I'll go back and look at that Kia again because it does seem very practical.
Its 3.5-kilowatt electric motor is capable of handling steep terrain
That's slightly less than 5 hp, less than your average lawnmower!!
The vehicle is designed for urban mobility, with a top speed of 50 kilometers per hour,
No way that thing can drive 6 people uphill at 50 km/h.
I think it has some niche use cases where it can be good, and best of luck to Mexico with this. But I don't see this as a popular means of transportation unless it is very cheap. The cost is stated at 150k Pesos. which is $ 8700,- USD. That does not sound quite cheap enough. But maybe it can be used for a lot of public service purposes?
That's probably an error from the site. The official one says 13kW:
Thanks that explains it, with 13 kW it's much more plausible.
3.5 kW is simply not enough for the claimed performance.
I searched for if something else is 3.5 or 3,5, but that number does not appear at all on the official page.
Weird typo, and also weird that nobody caught it? It simply doesn't make sense.
Yes, it is obviously a typo. For reference, GM's tiniest EV, the compliance-car SparkEV (2014-2017?16?) can dump over 120kW into the front wheels. While that is ridiculous and basically unusable if you like traction, the car only has a 19kWh battery and seats 4. Sure they were just learning but it's tiny and uses about 11kW on average outside of winter.
Edit, forgot EV torque: yes with only 13kW but speed limit of 50kph it probably can go uphill with a typical passenger load at speed.
I love comments from people who quote horsepower on an electric motor when horsepower is a fake number generated by measuring torque and using a constant number. Only applicable to gasoline engines.
This vehicle will carry 6 adults up a steep hill.
horsepower is a fake number generated by measuring torque and using a constant number.
It's just a unit of power. You can calculate watts from force x speed, too, if you use metric units. Yeah, you can shift the whole thing to a rotational system with torque and rotational velocity (and then derive the linear equivalent force and speed from those units as the radius of the circle cancel out).
Only applicable to gasoline engines.
Power is power. By using similar units it makes it easier to compare different vehicles. If everyone wants to convert to watts, we can, but we'd still be making those comparisons.
I only used hp because most people are more familiar with it.
And for my own electric car hp is also used in more than 9 out of 10 spec spaces to describe the power.
As I mentioned earlier, it has 150 kW equal to 204 hp.
And no you are wrong, it is in no way only applicable to gasoline engine, even giving you the benefit of the doubt that you probably mean ICE, which can be gasoline, Diesel, propane or even hydrogen.
IDK how old you are, but by your logic you sound like you are 8 years old.
ICP. There were streets ahead. But yeah, I can wait for reviews before I start nitpicking a press release.
Yes, compared to even my 2013 Leaf's 80kw motor it's a toy. But I look at this as a starting point. They were at ground zero, and now they have engineering experience, a manufacturing operation, and a finished working product to improve upon.
Turns out it at least has a 13 kW engine, the article is wrong on that point.
Still not a lot, but at least that makes the performance claims much more likely.
It's just below the power rating of the 1960-70 rear engine Fiat hatchbacks. Given it's an electric motor, it should do adequately.
Yes with 13, not if it only had 3.5.
Yes, 13kw makes a LOT more sense. That's a little more than half my original Leaf's capacity.
But in the hands of a car guy... there's potential.
Why wouldn't it be able to drive 6 people up a hill, so long as its got the battery?
This feels like it would be a problem for an ICE vehicle, but this is like, precisely where an electric vehicle is far superior to an ICE vehicle. Its very ICE brained/ ICE coded to do the mental translation from torque to HP, then back to torque. This simply isn't an issue for electric vehicles. You just go right to torque
kW is a measure of power, like HP, not torque. N.m is the SI unit for torque.
I think you're right in that an ICE vehicle with similar specs would be worse off. Also, I think there's an error regarding the stated output of the engine. Official sources are showing a much higher rated output of 13.5kw.
It still seems underpowered if it is intended to carry 6 adults uphill at 50 kph. Regardless of torque, power is the rate at which work is done. It can be expressed as the resistive force times the velocity. I can't find a weight for the vehicle, but based on vehicles with similar specs, I'll guess it's well over 700kg. Moving 700kg up a 6-degree slope, which is still a pretty reasonable grade, at 50kph would require over 13kw and that's the theoretical max, without passengers, headwinds, etc. No way is the Olinia 1 doing 50kph uphill with 6 adult passengers.
Perhaps that's not the problem it's designed to solve, though. Maybe it's okay if it slows down to 25kph, carrying 6 adults, because it's navigating an urban environment. If the point is efficiency in city commuting, this could be a viable addition to the array of solutions for displacing fossil fuels.
Your original comment just sounds like a lack of experience with electric vehicles. Simply put, EV and ICE are fundamentally different power trains. Routing a comparison through HP is exactly what someone familiar with ICE but not EV is exactly what you would do if you know traditional cars, but it doesn't map to EV's in how they work in the real life.
And honestly, at the price we could probably buy one, find six lemmings in Mexico and a decent hill and just run the experiment.
We might have a misunderstanding here.
The comment to which you're replying is my original comment.
Nothing in it is intended to be pro ICE or anti EV.
This doesn't have anything to do with something as abstract as engineered systems. It's basic physics. You can't get 15kw out of something with a max output of 14kw. That's just axiomatic.
P = Fv cosθ
https://www.tutorchase.com/notes/a-level-ocr/physics/6-3-2-mechanical-power-from-force-and-speed
Doesn't matter if it's ICE, EV, horses, flywheels powered by suspended weights, steam turbines powered by fusion, etc. It's just not possible to move a mass at an angle and velocity such that one of those variables increases without also increasing the power. These are some of the assumptions on which EVs are built. And they're constantly validated by testing and everyday EV (and ICE) driving experiences.
I sincerely hope this project succeeds for all the right reasons. I'm not advocating for the preservation of ICE vehicles and infrastructure. My concern here is STEM literacy among advocates of progressive solutions. I would very much like for us to be taken seriously, and I think that requires communicating our position and intent effectively.
Nobody but you said anything about ICE, you are making a straw man argument.
And saying converting from kW to hp has anything to do with torque is as moronic as claiming that km/h and mp/h are measuring different things, when they are obviously not, they are both accurate measurements of speed. In the exact same way kW and hp are both measurements of power. They are merely different scales, and I only made the conversion to make it easier to understand the power in relation to a vehicle.
For instance many EV's have 150 kW engines, (including mine), But in many car pages they are stated as 204 hp.
150 kW and 204 hp is EXACTLY the same, just like 3.5 kW is exactly the same as 4.7 hp, or almost 5 as I wrote.
As it turns out the article is wrong about the kW only being 3.5 kW, the true number is 13.5 kW, which makes the claimed performance figures way more plausible.
Just because an electric engine can output it's max performance faster, and doesn't have to rev up first, doesn't mean it has more than the stated power. Yes with an ICE car it would be worse in acceleration, but when it is revved up, they would have similar performance. Going 50 km/h which is the top speed of the car, it is obviously revved up to the max.
But for some reason you got upvotes? Sad to see that people are so easy to mislead with nonsense.
As I stated before, the performance claimed for the car is simply impossible with only a 3.5 kW engine, and as it turns out it is 13.5 kW.
So your "why not" question is based on ignorance, and your whole comment is an argument from ignorance.
The face on that thing is adorable!
I want one.
At that price I want two, one for each foot
Hell yeah