Lowered prices necessary - e-motorcycles s/b less than $5K, and 30MPH escooters s/b $1K imo

Agreed - What counts for consumers is the utility provided by their purchase. As long as an ICE vehicle can be purchased for less and powered with dirt cheap gas, electrics of all types will be relegated to the early adopters and tree huggers. Change the equation with a cheaper initial purchase price or increase the ICE operation costs dramatically (say gas at $5+ / gal in the US) and you have a receipt for EV success. Today, a Chinese built ICE scooter can easily be purchased and delivered to any customer in the US for less than $1000, so I’d say your ball park EV scooter prices are on the high side. When I purchased my heavily discounted “new” 2008 SLA EVT-4000e this past January, that amount was my break-even point. At the same time, I could have purchased an equivalent Chinese built ICE scooter with better performance and range for $800 (http://evosales.com/pd-save-gas-scooter.cfm). Over the next few years I will recoup some of my higher initial purchase cost through solar panel charging. But the biggest payback will be the enjoyment of thumbing my nose at big oil every time I pass a service station with oil spill inflated rising gas prices. Although I hate to say it - if the EVT had been above that $1,000 threshold, I’d only be getting 100 miles from a gallon of gas right now. That’s my one cent worth (when I do plug in to an outlet it is 25 miles per 2.5Kw charge at 10 cents per Kw).

I hear what you're saying. It's a popular topic of conversation here at CuMoCo.

Some other things to bear in mind:

1) A Vespa GTV 300 costs $6,899 MSRP and a CuMoCo C130 costs $7,499. That's only a $600 additional cost for the CuMoCo. Now, consider that in the US everyone is entitled to a 10% Federal Tax Credit meaning that the C130 (our most expensive scooter) is $150 less than Vespa's flagship scooter. Yes, the Vespa has more brand recognition. However, Piaggio (owner of Vespa) obviously believe there's a market for a $7K scooter.

2) If you look at total cost of ownership (TCO) over a 7 year lifespan you will see that the cost per mile of the C130 vs. the GTV 300 is about half (15 cents per mile for the C130 vs. 30 cents per mile for the GTV 300). The TCO figure takes into account fuel + maintenance + purchase price.

3) Over 1,000,000 Prius' have been sold in the US. That doesn't include all of the other hybrids that have been sold. There's a price premium for any hybrid - yet a LOT of people have purchased them.

4) An electric scooter is more convenient than a gas one - they're just plain better. When something is better and is well marketed then usually it can command a higher market value.

I don't disagree that there's room in the market for a lower cost product and that if people choose to purchase on price alone then they'll be buying gas for a long time yet. However, there's room in the market for higher cost products as well as the above "off the top of my head" points attempt to illustrate.

I also expect prices for electrics will come down. For example we've already seen the price of LiFePO4 batteries becoming more affordable.

I don't expect to change your mind - just offering a different point of view. Perhaps you need to consider Marketing 201? ;-) (just a friendly jest - no offense intended!)

I don't know what CuMoCo's numbers look like, but I'm guessing there isn't a huge room for lowering prices, not if they want to make any profit at all. My guess is that the cost of components is going to be relatively fixed until they reach much higher volumes, orders of magnitude larger.

And for things like lithium batteries (probably the most expensive single component in something like the C130) to see a serious cost reduction, the entire industry has to expand by an order of magnitude, not just a single company or two.

Someone like Nissan has more room to play pricing games with electrics, since they have the financial clout to sell at a loss for a year or three, and can also use their much larger corporate muscle against suppliers. That's why the Leaf looks to be well priced.

I think we'll see better prices for smaller electric vehicles (scooters) in a year or two, but the smaller companies really don't have much room to maneuver (yet).

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4) An electric scooter is more convenient than a gas one - they're just plain better. When something is better and is well marketed then usually it can command a higher market value.
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HAHAHA!

I hear you are trying to build one....

I think it may be much closer to the truth to say: "Some electric scooters will one day be more convenient than gas scooters".

At the moment electric scooters are quite simply not better than gas scooters. At least the vast majority seems to be immature technology with a very high failure rate.

Currently they are mainly suitable for tinkerers.

Imho, electric scooters per 100KM cost, on a worst-case basis, is 3X-6X that of an equivalent gasoline scooter, due to the cost of battery replacement (unless you are running on revived batteries)

You are not really a disinterested party...you have a business involving revived batteries.

Why would you choose to compare a worst cases basis? That's a rather deceptive statement. Why not compare them at their average or reasonable care use?

I do much better than your worst case basis. I beat the gas scooter hands down. I have three years of data to prove it.

Your posts are pretty spammy (focused on marketing your business).

Could you tone down the marketing of your business a notch?

ECONOMICS 101 sez that demand goes up when prices are brought down.

Sorry, that's a pretty pathetic reply. Econ 101 also includes things like fixed and variable costs, doesn't it? How about you drop the prices on all your services to $1, and see if you actually make it up in volume? I bet the increase in demand is meaningless if you take a loss on everything you do.

Clearly, there's some wiggle room with prices, but there are also hard limits. For a vehicle, you run into a hard limit at the price of the parts required to assemble the vehicle. Even if you donate your labor for free (which can't last long), there's a minimum cost at which you can sell an electric vehicle. And yes, the cost of your parts can drop if you increase volume enough, but that effect is limited and doesn't happen immediately.

You can save money on parts by getting them from low-quality suppliers, especially in places like China, but that has the risk of producing a crappy product that also kills demand. I think the approach that CuMoCo is taking has some promise: try for higher quality mass produced parts from China, but do the assembly locally (in the US) for better quality control, and build a few key items yourself. It's a much less expensive path than what Vectrix took, but there are compromises and risks associated.

There's also the problem that demand can be hard to create, no matter how good your product is. Vectrix went bankrupt partly because they expected much higher demand than they experienced. Sure, their price started rather high, but they lowered it and still weren't able to pay the bills. They started with a high R&D budget and high manufacturing costs, and those had to be paid for somehow. Selling a few thousand bikes a year was simply insufficient to keep up.

Lower prices are coming, but the industry is new, and these things take time. You can't just wave a magic wand and cut prices in half.