The term “Tesla killer” has been tossed about for some years now, but so far nobody’s managed to bump them off yet. But now the Russian weapons manufacturer, famous for its AK-47 assault rifle, vows it is going to take on Tesla, although the car that they’re showing here as a prototype or proof of concept makes one wonder, as it is clearly the body of an Izh 2125, based on the Moskvitch 412. I suspect it’s not exactly going to make Elon Musk lose even more sleep.
The Moskow Times and a few other sites covered this, and I was a bit suspicious that this was all a prank, even though it’s not April 1, but I traced it back to what appears to be Kalashnikov’s website.
There’s even a video there, but some of the specifications of the CV-1 seem to be a bit lost in translation. 0-60 time is given as 6 seconds, which is significantly slower than the 2.6 seconds of Tesla’s fastest version of the Model S. But they do say at some point that the Izh-bodied concept is a “test bench for the developed systems”. Good to know, although retro is in. Who knows, this might just be the next cool car to have in Silicon Valley.
Six seconds is faster than the average Moskvitch, but what next? An Electric Peykan from Iran? (An electric Arrow straight to the heart).
For your information IRAN khodro already makes samand EV and Denna EV.Paykan sedan production line was sold to Khartoum motor company in 2005.Paykan vanet(pickup)is still in production.
Is the pickup still going? I thought it had been sold to Sudan a few years ago and was replaced by the Arisun.
I like it. Why not go for a retro car look, and a former Soviet one at that? If it is a mule, then really it could have used any car as a base, as long as the size worked. My question is whether this is a break/avant/universal/wagon or a hatch? If it is a wagon, there will be fanboys clamoring for one to be brought over to the US. We all know hatches don’t sell in America.
You get the lift kit, I’ll bring the gray cladding. We’ll sell a million of them if the market sees them as “crossovers”.
Don’t forget giving it a name like Cossack or Elbrus.
Wouldn’t it be funny if this were the kind of styling that coastal Millennials go crazy over. 🙂
I just commented on this over on TTAC, but not to repeat my comment, I do notice one thing I missed: Is that a fresh air scoop on the cowl? If so, that is really cool!
If ol’ AK really wants to make a splash, why doesn’t he just design a retro American vehicle? Might as well recreate a tri-five Chevy or ’54-57 Ford or similar Chrysler?
One of those just may be more popular than anyone realizes.
I just thought of a name for that above vehicle: The AK Electra!
Zackman yep fresh air scoop, my grandpa’s ’87 was just like that. Spent a lot of time closed given the dusty dirt roads his Kombi spent most of its days on.
The problem for adoption of electric vehicles remains battery technology. No one has made significant quantum leap on energy storage. The battery used on Tesla has gotten a lot of hype, but most of us do not know that Tesla does not own the technology, it is sourced from Panasonic. Worst it is the plain old electrochemical battery with a better mouse trap approach. Personally I do not think the electrical storage is not aelectrochemical device.
A threat to Telsa, I still believe the companies like BYD will displace Tesla one day. BYD has its own vehicle production facility and experience, it also makes battery with its own technology. Its mass market sedans have reasonable range for its price, it sells its vehicles on the market without government subsidies.
The next challenge to electric vehicles is the electricity generation capability and distribution. In US, there is no increase of electricity generation capability for long time, and its power distribution network is very inadequate. Just look at the power shortage each summer during the heat wave. Can we imagine the power shortage when 10 % of vehicles in US running on electricity? Compound the problem is the fast changing, this means to pump large amounts of electricity (energy) into the battery in short time, what size of power outlet will be?
Toyota, arguably the most successful car manufacturer now, has no plan for electrical vehicle in full production in next 15 years, and it actually walked away from Tesla few years ago.
BYD relies heavily on Chinese subsidies.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackperkowski/2018/05/16/once-a-stock-market-darling-byd-now-bears-brunt-of-chinas-changing-electric-vehicle-regulations/#505e4c811258
Your comment is one factual error after another.
Tesla’s batteries are produced by a joint venture with Panasonic, but the specifications, chemistry and other details are Tesla’s. They are currently considered to be the most energy dense batteries in production.
BYD also makes batteries and EVs, but their batteries are not quite as energy dense as Tesla’s, but perfectly usable. China has massive incentives on EVs, and that explains why BYD and others are selling so many EVs in China.
Even if every car in the US were an EV, the US electric grid has enough spare capacity at night to charge them all up. Electric use at night is currently very low. Most EVs get charged overnight. The required capacity for quick charging EVs that are on long distance trips is not considered to be a problem.
You’re 100% wrong about Toyota. They are scrambling at high speed to develop EVs. They will appear within two years in China, as they have to build EVs in order to meet the mandates there. Their EVs will appear here within 3-4 years. They walked away from Tesla for totally different reasons.
Toyota is scrambling to develop pure electric cars solely because of California pollution laws which require them. If California loses its waiver from Federal Car Pollution Standards….well it will be interesting to see how Toyota et al proceed.
Certainly the technology for successful pure-electric cars exists, but I do tend to believe that there’s an upper limit to demand for them. Given that the median family income for the United States was $57,617 according to the 2016 Census, they are are simply out of the price range of many families, and are obviously impractical for anyone without a dedicated personal garage for a charger. When there are only small numbers of E-cars, public charging will suffice but when large numbers of E-cars need to be plugged in for hours at a time charging will become a problem. I doubt (having been in HR) that many companies will want to spend the money for electric car charging for large numbers of employees. It’s fun and good press when you’re charging 5 or 10 cars, but the logistics of maintaining 100 or 200 chargers as a benefit for your employees is a real headache.
Given that gasoline prices see likely to remain reasonable for a decade or more, I see demand for electrics reaching saturation in a few years. For what it’s worth $3.00 (per gallon) gasoline in 2018 adjusts after inflation to .41 cents a gallon in 1968.
Toyota is scrambling to develop pure electric cars solely because of California pollution laws which require them.
This simply isn’t correct. They’ve been meeting those requirements with their Mirai fuel cell car, albeit with heavy incentives. Toyota absolutely has to have EVs for China, as they are now mandated at significant numbers. All the manufacturers are gearing up to build EVs for that market.
But Toyota has rightfully said that they need to have EVs for all the developed markets, like the EU and NA, and not just to meet mandates. They can’t afford to be left behind.
I’m not going to wade into another EV debate here. But as to affordability, EVs can be leased for very cheap (MikePDX leases a Fiat 500E for $89 month). The Nissan Leaf is very affordable, as are others.
As to the market for them, obviously it’s going to be a segment of the market for some time to come. How big is the multi-billion dollar question.
In Canada we pay much more for fuel thank in the USA, and generally much less for electricity.
My present daily driver is a 2003 Honda Accord Coupe V-6. I can get $6000 to scrap it and there’s a $5000 EV credit.
The annual running cost @ 20,000 km/year is almost identical for my Honda and a new Leaf.
Toyota is scrambling to meet mandates w/o as high of losses as they have for the Mirai.
Yes EVs can be leased for cheap, but that is because of those mandates that tie the number of profitable vehicles they can sell to how many of the EVs they can sell. Then there are still other gov’t subsidies for some vehicles.
So that $89 month 500e is only that cheap because tax payers and buyers of Jeeps and Rams are subsidizing it. It certainly isn’t that cheap because the residuals are high. http://www.paramountmotorsnw.com/inventory.asp?showOnly=Fiat
Its a bit US centric to presume Toyota defines it objectives by US legislation as Toyota sell more vehicles to the rest of the world, I think US sales account for 30% so they ignore the rest of the world at their peril. Their Home and Europeans sales are greater than US sales and we have similar attitudes to electric and pollution.
As in Canada but probably more so in Europe, petrol and diesel prices are much higher than the US, more than double.
I am a true petrol head but recognise that the Internal combustion engine is 20th Century technology no matter how many sticking plasters are put on it.
There is also something about the piston mass accelerating, decelerating and stopping thousands of times a minute, all that reciprocating mass vibrating about, compared to pure rotary motion that irritates me on one level, not to mention the complex transmission system because the engines only develop useful torque over a narrow rev range and none at zero revs.
That the IC engine is refined and reliable is a tribute to constant refinement and development, but the law of diminishing returns must mean that no matter how much more effort is expended, there cannot be much more to come out of the design and remain affordable.
Its the 21st century and time to move on, from the simple premise that huge power stations, be they nuclear, fossil fueled, wind or hydro power, can generate the energy more efficiently and cleaner than millions of inefficient and out of tune IC engines not running at optimum efficiency (traffic, stop start etc) it makes sense.
I want a cleaner world free of exhaust fumes and look forward to the mass adoption of Electric so welcome the EU requirements for emissions free cars.
Looking forward to the enhanced refinement, greater performance and sheer reliability of an electric car once the range, fast charging, cheaper batteries and power distribution issue have been resolved, come on scientists get on with it
I wonder if an industry will develop to convert existing cars to Electric rather having to scrap them. I would hope it possible if the batteries could be shrunk in size and weight to match the gas tank it could replace, and or fill the engine compartment.
Shhhh, Lee Turner. Lots of blasphemy in that one 😉
“Given that the median family income for the United States was $57,617 according to the 2016 Census, they are are simply out of the price range of many families”
According to Kelley Blue Book, 1) The average price for a new vehicle in the US in Jan. 2018 was $36,270. 2) The average price for a new electric vehicle was $38,775. 3) New full-size pickups that month averaged $46,619.
For example, MSRP on a new Nissan Leaf is $29,990 before any tax breaks, and a lease is $219/month.
New cars are certainly out of the price range of many families, but that’s another story. Mainstream EVs have become quite reasonable compared with other types of new vehicles.
Around here free charging at work is a perk that some companies do invest in. A friend who works at a small IT company the boss will install a charger for every employee that purchases and uses a plug in vehicle and many do take advantage of it. I think they are over 50% but it is a small company. At the other end of company size, I’ve given a presentation at the Kirkland WA Google campus, the underground Parking Garage was filled with charging stations. The number of spaces with chargers were probably about equal to the number w/o and as far as empty spaces driving a car w/o a plug I had more choices of place to park as most of the spots with a charger had a vehicle plugged in.
gasoline prices see likely to remain reasonable for a decade or more, I see demand for electrics reaching saturation in a few years.
Anyone who believes prices for anything (especially oil) will be stable for the next decade is ignorant of both history and economics.
EVs are a hedge against upcoming oil shocks / economic downturns. And the ecological issue is completely mainstream for Gen X / Millennials in OECD countries.
If you’re not thinking of making EVs, you’re nowhere these days. Kudos to the old Izh factory for making this combi into a great testbed. Probably not a good idea to actually manufacture these as is, though. Not quite up to date from a passive security standpoint…
Also, I’d recommend not using the term Kalashnikov when naming cars. Didn’t work too well for Messerschmidt.
BSA did OK with their name on motorbikes though!
Tatra – using the name of a famous gun seems the perfect way to win over a certain clientele in the US.
Nor Saab
OTOH it seems to be okay for BMW.
Jury’s still out on Mitsubishi.
Depending on a serect source may work for running a Chinese restaurant, not a modern enterprise. More, does Tesla really have a better formula? Then why does it depend on Panasonic? If it is so promising, it is stupid for Toyota walked away? Why doesn’t it highlight the subsidies getting ftom government?
Every country subsidies its industry one way and other. BYD is a private enterprise in China with no really high level political connections, it can not get that much subsidies. It probably gets from corrupted money to legalize those money.
US electricity generation capability is limited, with subsiding the solar industry, some electricity companies are losing money by mandated buy back the solar electricity. The decades of deregulation makes the power network in bad shape. Also, just do the math, how many energy to power say 1 million vehicles which now runs on fossil feul, and equal to electricity energy. There will be shortage in urban dense areas.
Toyota plans to produce over 5 million electric vehicles on 2030, I doubt it can materialize. Its EV plan is only meerting government mandate.
Presumably, Tesla needs (or is accepting) Panasonic’s help and capital investment to manufacture the world’s most advanced batteries because manufacturing those batteries in sufficient volume and at minimum cost is difficult and capital intensive.
If the world’s most advanced batteries were easy to manufacture in simple, cheap factories, Tesla probably wouldn’t bother with having a partner to help manufacture them.
I Googled this so I wouldn’t sound stupid ;-).
Reminds me of the Ford 021C concept from 1999.
Yes! I thought I saw that look before. More about it here.
At the time the stylist said “Ask children to draw a car, and they’ll draw something like this…”
Jaw dropped. I still can hardly believe this isn’t a spoof. Does the spokesman look anything like Sacha Baron Cohen?
I’m off to ask for a licence to build electric Volvo 245s in Minnesota. Makes perfect sense.
You’ll be able to pedal them to top up the batteries.
It’s got the face of a 1972 Chevy pick up truck.
Agreed, I see a customized/modernized 67-72 GM truck when I look at that face.
I like the stance on the front wheels, but you might have trouble at the first sign of a corner…
The negative camber shouldn’t hurt the cornering, unless it’s so extreme it’s unloading the outside of the tire. But there are practical reasons for a street car not to have that much camber.
He means can the wheel actually turn to take a corner
The camber is the only reason the wheel can turn, or fit in the fender. 🙂
A neighbor on the edge of town has wheels just like that on their ’96 Celica.
When I saw it, my first thought was that it was customized English Ford from the 1960s. Zodiac? Zephyr? Consul? Something along those lines. I can certainly see having an electric car for commuting to work and running errands close to home. They’d be fine as a second car.
But many of us only own a single car and I just don’t see electric cars as having the driving range that a gasoline-powered vehicle or some sort of hybrid vehicle would provide. I’m sort of surprised that hybrids aren’t selling better, but I suppose a big part of that is because gas prices have dropped.
BIL has a Nissan leaf gen 1 it will go 105kms on a charge but gains quite a lot on downhills, its nice to drive he let me have a turn lots of go off the line and nearly as quiet at highway speed as my C5 I’d have one for commuting but they are expensive even used ex JDM.
The lease return Leafs are cheap in the US. $10k will get you a 3 year old with 20-30k miles all day long and those aren’t base models.
9-14k here +31c per kwh to feed them, still a good bet for a commuter car though.
There are 5 for sale in Australia, the cheapest one is asking $20k – originally they sold (well, barely) for over $50k. I don’t know how long it has been for sale, but it would seem that they are starting the negotiations high hoping an electric car enthusiast just has to have it.
Yeah the sides immediately made me think of the Zephyr 6 I used to walk past on the way to school. It looked nice until you were close enough to see the brush strokes.
They had dropped “Consul” by that point and just called them “Zephyr 4”.
Series 3 Zodiac by Abbott.
With all of the discussions about the electric car technology, I keep wondering about the long-term usage, namely the batteries. We’ve have similar experiences with our smartphones and notebook computers: the batteries start to lose their charge over the time and from heavy cycle of discharging and recharging.
Who would pay to replace them at end of their use period? What would happen to the vehicles at end of the lease? Sell them to the consumers who would probably end up paying to replace the batteries.
Would the depleted batteries be treated as ‘core’ where people bring the worn parts such as CVJ shafts for credit toward the new or rebuilt parts?
Another question: do we have adequate and steady supply of raw material necessary for batteries and motors to meet the ramped up demand in the next five, ten years?
Yes the raw materials in the batteries have significant value so they carry a significant core charge and will be recycled, not to mention that putting them in the garbage is illegal, at least in the US and I’m certain other countries.
They are actually battery packs made up of a number of cells, many times the cells do not fail at the same rate, so it is possible to put together 1 good working pack from 2 or more “bad” packs.
As far as longevity goes there are a few people out there who have put a pretty significant number of full cycles on the battery. The real unknown at this point is the effect of pure time. Sure we see a few who have put 100k or more on in a handful of years, but will they do that for the person who takes 2 or 3 times as many years to reach that number of cycles, though they will likely be light cycles.
Its kind of hillman Hunter hatch but higher waisted. Like a 50s design facelifted in the 60s.
Never thought I would say this as my father stupidly bought a Moskvitch 412 in the late 70s and it was a POS, but that does actually look good.
Take a 412 saloon, drop a BMW 4 cylinder engine and 5 speed box, convert to discs and it might just make an interesting custom car, the grill work and sky blue paintjob has made a world of difference. I would not have any qualms about major rework on an old car as the world only needs one stock Moskvitch for posterity
As said before kudos for having a go at an EV.
They are not the only Eastern state having a go , has anyone else seen the 3 wheel Nobe from Estonia I love this funky car and the ethos behind it
https://www.eta.co.uk/2018/06/06/nobe-electric-car-small-on-wheels-but-big-on-style/
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/2020-nobe-100-3-wheeled-classic-ev/
There is a lot of creativity coming from the eastern bloc, like this crazy Russian
http://solifdesign.blogspot.com/
PS Not to be outdone, even the tiny and ultra traditionalist Morgan is looking at EVs
Is it steampunk, dieselpunk or retro future I don’t know but I can picture myself driving one of these.
https://www.morgan-motor.co.uk/ev3/
I’d love a Morgan trike. I saw my first one in the flesh this year, in downtown Marbella, perhaps tellingly.
That Nobe is pretty cool too. The styling raises all sorts of possibilities. You could have a selection of front clips aping different classics, like the ones for Japanese vans. Presumably if they get popular they’ll be regulated out of existence.
It kind of reminds me about this article that I read in a 1988 issue CAR magazine which I found being sold at a thrift store in Maryland in the mid 1990’s and which I bought and still own today.
It talked about the USSR cars that were being exported to the West and stated that western car bosses could sleep soundly.
They ended up being shipped back. Eastern Bloc cars were common (like, you’d see see several a day, especially in poorer areas) but good luck finding a Lada in the UK now.
That is partly because of the scrappage scheme (true of any humdrum 80s/90s car) and partly because used car prices were low and Soviet cars had a terrible reputation, so you could buy a solid Lada with current inspection for the equivalent of $250 easily. No MOT certificate? 50 quid.
Russian sailors shipped them home for a profit and eventually the small ads were full of people offering quick cash for Ladas, condition unimportant.
Obviously their reputation in Russia was different. In 1989 I’d bet most Brits would have chosen a used Morris Ital over a new Lada – not sure anyone else would make the same choice.
This car was featured in a New York Times article. According to the article, the car, as well as a prototype of a robot that the Kalashnikov company claims could be used for engineering and combat, are being widely mocked in Russia. The car was the subject of a spoof video showing it flying through space in reference to the Tesla car sent up in a rocket, and the robot was derisively compared to a statue.
Note that the car lacks side view mirrors, which the author wryly remarks is an innovation that makes it well suited to Russian driving habits.
https://nyti.ms/2BJ8lEp