I knew that Marchionne (FIAT CEO) was against electric cars but now he is really exaggerating! He is asking to American people not to buy the electric 500! :scared: Fca, Marchionne agli americani: - Il Fatto Quotidiano IMO even if FIAT is not making money with the electric 500 Marchionne should consider the benefits that FIAT is getting from the electric 500 in terms of technical experience in the field of EV, PR aspects and so on. Unluckily this is the kind of executives that we have in Italy. (The linked article is in Italian, but you can easily translate it in English thanks to Google)
He has said this before too: Fiat Chrysler CEO: Please dont buy Fiat 500e electric car - Yahoo Finance Brutally honest but, short-sighted as well.
I own one and it is absolutely worth buying in its current form, if what you want is an electric city car. It has the same BEV range as an i3 for $15K less. It is more stylish. It looks better than a Leaf and has more range. It is highly maneuverable and fun to drive. I question whether Fiat loses $14K on each one since its MSRP is about $16K more than an ICE 500 and I doubt the electric drive train costs them $30K more than the ICE drivetrain. Maybe Marchionne is amortizing the program's R&D cost over the small number of units they expect to sell since that are treating it as a compliance car sold in limited geographies.
Fiat did not do any engineering for the Fiat 500e drivetrain. It was all subcontracted out to Bosch. And he placed a very small order. When you do that the per unit cost can get expensive.
Well, they did. The FIAT 500e is a wonderful car. My wife got one--the first car she has ever loved. She loves it as much as I love my Roadster. It gets lots of comments when she parks it around town and it was a big hit at Earth Day and Plug In America day here in Santa Barbara. Marchionne just has his head where the sun don't shine!
Good point. Clearly Fiat has no interest in EVs. The 500e is strictly a compliance car. In 5 years Fiat is going to regret their lack of inhouse EV expertise.
Really? It (lack of in house expertise) does not seem to have bothered them up until now (thinking back to my old X19)
You have to hand it to Marchionne, though. He is very talented at passing the cup around. He complains the government is going to put him out of business by forcing him to sell a miniscule number of 500e's, but at the same time he courts government subsidies left and right.
Maybe Marchionne is not able to read/understand numbers. I'll plot a graph for him: Data from http://www.mit.gov.it/mit/mop_all.php?p_id=19370
Marchionne impressed with Tesla Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne met with Tesla, Apple CEOs It seems that SM may be changing his mind on the subject. He gets my respect for not following BMW dubious line of "We deny any collaboration with Tesla" and "We deny collaboration on Apple car" Here is SM on Tesla: May I add most people are more than impressed, we are also grateful, but some (will not name names) feel the need to keep denying. Fragile egos need preservation. SM on meeting Tim Cook:
Hope SM saw all the 500e-s too zipping around all over the Bay Area. One could construe that quote about EM as a bit patronizing ?! I hope it's genuine admiration.