Would you buy a cheap electric hyper car?

Hold on, I’m going to kick in the open door that was already open before Christian von Koenigsegg tried to kick it open. The CEO of the best car company in the world, Koenigsegg, told Top Gear that "The appetite in the market for this level of car, fully electric, is extremely low." And by ‘this level of car’ he means the hyper car category, because that is where he operates.

And it makes sense, because Mate Rimac, one of the best guys in the car industry that also happens to be CEO of Rimac and Bugatti, confirmed demand for the Nevera has plummeted to almost non-existent.

Christian claims to know exactly why this drop in demand for powerful EV’s is happening: they’re lifeless robots. “you want to talk to the beast, right? You want to have a dialogue. It’s an argumentation. You want to hear how it’s feeling and in what mood it is. You want the throbbing, the pumping, the heat, the sounds, the shifts, all of these aspects that just make it come alive. I would say an electric car is a bit more of a robot.”

I fully agree with the Swede. He makes a good point, but I think there is more at play here.

Just imagine pulling up to a traffic light in your brand new and very expensive Rimac Nevera R. Next to you a cryptoking in a Tesla Model S Plaid pulls up. You know where this goes. While your car is better in every way, it still has a hard time beating the machine that Musk made for funsies.

And it’s not only cryptokings in Tesla’s, it’s pretty much every Chinese EV-maker is building supercar level EV’s at the moment. They all have the same features as hyper-EV’s have. It’s way harder to differentiate between the two when it’s mainly a battery pack and electric motors in a different body.

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I can speak about driving that level of car, and I can tell you that the impressiveness of these technical marvels wears off pretty quickly. They all do 2 second drags and have insane levels of grip. But that is also where it ends. There is a distinct lack of character in these cars. It’s all smooth, powerful and very ‘premium’, but there is nothing much that keeps me engaged like a car with a V8 does.

What I’m trying to say is an EV is pretty much the perfect car for day to day use, but that’s about it. An enthousiast will never ever buy an EV for fun, because it only delivers part of the ‘fun’ experience. Sounds, smells and vibrations are a very important part of the equation, which electric cars are having a hard time delivering.

But wait, there is more, because a lot of the insanely expensive EV’s are just a bit more than tech demo’s that are being sold. Take Rimac for example. They are not only selling complete drivetrains, but also different smaller parts like inverters to other not so hyper EV-companies. I think it doesn’t really feel all that well to pay a lot of money to essentially see parts of your hypercar end up in a fully electric Skoda or something.

I mean, it would be something different if by buying a Rimac, you’d be investing in the company and eventually seeing something for it. Like a kickstarter or something, but for the insanely rich. In that case you’d expected to see the tech of your car in other, lesser cars.

But the biggest thing Von Koenigsegg missed here is the residual value. All of the above, including his remarks, compound into the fact hyper EV’s are not that attractive to buy as an investment. Nobody knows if the Rimac Nevera R, in all its rareness, will be worth a couple of bucks more in ten years. It sure does seem like it will be the other way around.

In other news

Earlier this week I mentioned Lucid owners where going be able to do the “Look mom, no hands”-thing while driving. In the near future everyone can do that, even non-Lucid owners, because the car builder minted a deal with Uber to supply robotaxi’s with the help of self driving hardware from Nuro (Lucid doesn’t build that themselves).

Verstappen is still not at Mercedes. Toto is still unhappy.

The US-based Swedish maffia (they made an appearance in FUBAR on Netflix) will be able to get the Volvo EX60 without having to pay more because of the Trump-Tariffs. Volvo decided to allocate some production capacity in its US-factory to the most popular car in their line-up.

About that Ferrari Xiaomi YU7, it seems like that isn’t as amazing as Xiaomi claimed. In a roadtest it only managed to travel 500 km before the batteries were empty. That is a lot less than Xiaomi claims. About 35 percent less to be clear. That is a lot, especially since the weather and road conditions were in favor of the car.

I’m guessing VW exec Ralf Brandstätter is a bit confused. He said the Chinese market is not worth it anymore for the brand, since there is no money to be made and VW is being squeezed out of the market. But at the same time brand is planning to launch a completely new China-specific platform and Jetta-branding in 2027 to compete with the other 129 brands that oversaturate the domestic market. Am I missing something?

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