Too early to retire: Volkswagen e-up! returned to the market after a break

Volkswagen's most affordable electric car will soon be available for order again on the European market. The small electric hatchback was taken off the market in 2020 due to..growing demand!

Electric VW e-up! entered the European market in 2013, that is, even before the start of dieselgate and mass electro fever. In 2019, the “baby” battery underwent a planned upgrade, as a result of which it received a battery with a larger capacity of 32.3 kWh, a full charge of which is enough for 260 km of the WLTP cycle. The 83 hp electric motor allows you to dial the first “hundred” in 11.9 s, the maximum speed is limited at around 130 km / h. With a starting price of 22,000 euros and generous European subsidies for the purchase of e-up! The 2019 sample turned out to be a very profitable offer, the residents of the city began to line up.

The problem is that Volkswagen was not ready for such demand for e-up!: at the beginning of 2020, its cumulative sales from previous years amounted to 21,000 units, and suddenly began an avalanche in demand, which does not mean the moment associated with the plan “slow» production plant in Bratislava (Slovakia). In the context of the coronavirus that hit the world, it was impossible to quickly increase production, it was the turn of e-up! it lasted for over a year, so orders had to be stopped.

Customers were willing to wait even longer, but e-do! is a low-margin model that Volkswagen should only produce in combination with government subsidies for automakers, and these subsidies were scheduled to be eliminated in Germany's key market at the end of 2021. The German government changed its mind and extended subsidies for 2022, so VW e-up! will soon be on sale again – this was reported by the German edition of Automobilwoche.

After the “return” e-up! will rise in price and will cost about 26,500 euros in the basic configuration, but still much cheaper than the next in the hierarchy of the electric hatchback VW ID.3, for which you will have to pay at least 36,960 euros, and even with the price tag will increase e-up !, most likely they will be sold out, including rental companies that really need cheap trains.

Without Automobilwoche's note, by the way, we would not have noticed a pause in the implementation of the VW e-up!, since in the sales statistics for 2021 it appears as a tail of a tail, that is, it was impossible to buy it, but shipments were going on, that is, the statistics are taken into account. So, according to the CleanTechnica resource, in the first 11 months of last year, Volkswagen shipped as many as 32,990 electric vehicles to Europe! With this result, the small hatchback surpassed the well-deserved Nissan Leaf (29,575 units), but lagged behind such active market participants as the Peugeot e-208 (38,257 units) and Fiat 500e (39,530 units). VW ID.3 sold 63,345 units during the same period, but the American Tesla Model 3 (115,485 units) became the leader of the European electric vehicle market.

It is unknown how long the VW e-up will last.