Tag: cars

What the Electric Fiat 500e Is Like—From a Fiat 500 Owner

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It’s also nice to use a car with modern amenities like lane guidance and auto braking when it detects a pedestrian. Heck, even having a reversing camera is nice. However, the Fiat 500e constantly warns me about “emergency vehicles” in front on the display (it plays a scarily loud sound, too), but it’s unfortunately wrong 80 percent of the time. Stop giving me a heart attack!

The Old Range-and-Charging Problem

You’re getting a roughy 150-mile range on the Fiat 500e, which is OK for how often I drive. I don’t commute for work, so most of my trips are for leisure. I did drive the 500e more often than I probably would in a normal week, but after four days, I went from 96 to 41 percent after around 53 miles. This poses a problem when I need to make the occasional longer jaunt, like when visiting my in-laws or going on a road trip.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

I have a house with a parking spot in New York City, which makes me very privileged and lucky to be able to charge from home—however, the charger Fiat includes was just a smidge too short to reach the charging outlet at the back of my house. Regardless, many folks are not going to have a luxury like that and will have to use charging stations. When I tried looking for charging stations near me, almost all were described as “slow.” Thankfully, there was just one marked as “fast.”

But before that, earlier in the week I found myself near WIRED’s Manhattan office, and I figured I’d find a spot to park and charge the car while I sat in the office for two hours. The first parking garage I went to was full, so they turned me away. The second I went to said it’d cost $60 to charge and park for two hours because, in New York City, you’re not paying only for electricity but also real estate. Sixty dollars boosted my battery from 41 to 77 percent. It’s worth noting that I regularly pay around $35 every two weeks to refuel my gas Fiat 500 (and it takes a few minutes).

Finding the right fast-charging station is important. The one near my home that had plenty of spots available (on a Thursday evening), and I watched many EV drivers passing the time in their cars as they charged, watching videos on their phones. I pulled up, plugged the car in, and after roughly 20 minutes I had gained 20 percent, which cost me roughly $4. Now I can get used to that.

I didn’t get to test drive the Fiat 500e on a longer trip, though I imagine I’d have to be a bit more meticulous about making sure there are fast chargers on my route and time it so that a 30-minute recharge could perhaps fall right during a lunch or bathroom break. It’s more involved, and this is arguably the biggest pause I’d have about buying an EV if I frequently make long trips (but I don’t).

Let’s Talk Money

While I was researching a car to buy, I frequently saw the backronym for Fiat: Fix It Again Tony. These cars seem to have earned a poor reputation for reliability and maintenance over the years. I had the 500 I bought inspected, and it was in fair condition, though the previous owner did tell me they had to replace the car’s door handles after they broke off. I have never heard of a car’s door handles just breaking off, but apparently it’s a common problem among Fiats. I can’t say much about the reliability of the Fiat 500e in the US, but I’m hoping it’s improved.

The elephant in the room is the $32,500 starting price (the model I tested starts at $36,000). You have tons of EV options with more room and better range, like the Nissan Leaf, Hyundai Kona Electric, and the Tesla Model 3.

However, if you’re after a small car, there really aren’t many options in the US, save the new Mini Cooper SE, which has a $30,900 starting price. I’m consistently envious watching my UK counterparts enjoying a suite of tiny and affordable electric cars—we need them here, too. (I would totally drive the Microlino.)

The Fiat 500e is too expensive, but we’re starved for choice in the US, especially for small EVs that look great. The Fiat 500e is just that. I’d easily choose to drive it over my gas model; too bad it’s out of my budget. It also doesn’t come in yellow (boo!). If Fiat could solve those two problems, I’d happily open my wallet.

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August 17, 2024
EVs Are Losing Up to 50 Percent of Their Value in One Year

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Electric vehicle depreciation is something of a hot topic right now, and for good reason. On one hand, there are some fantastic deals to be had on the secondhand market, but on the other of course, there’s the thorny issue of some EVs losing half of their value in a single year.

Cars losing you a chunk of cash the instant they’re driven off the dealer lot is nothing new, especially at the pricier end of the market. And if you intend to keep your shiny new EV for a long time, then its worth after just a year or two matters far less. But what if you’ve experimented with your first EV then decided its range or your local charging infrastructure isn’t up to scratch, and want to sell within the first year? If that’s you, you’d better be prepared for a significant loss.

In a bid not to tar all EVs with the same brush, we’ve aimed to be balanced in our approach to discovering trade-in valuations. There’s plenty of color to be reported here, too—like the US dealer who actively warned our reporter against selling him their EV, or the story of a Mercedes EQE that lost more than $600 each day—but for now let us deliver the cold, hard numbers.

We are using two tools for this research. The first is an online appraisal system by Edmunds, the US automotive industry resource, and the second is Cap HPI, a vehicle valuation service for the UK auto trade. Let’s start with the UK electric trade-in landscape, then compare it with the US’s.

Main Offenders

Our first discovery was that, in the UK, various new electric cars lose 50 percent of their value in the first 12 months. Yes, you read that right—some EVs depreciate by 50 percent in a single year.

Now, this cannot be said of every EV, but Cap HPI data provided to WIRED by Parkers, a respected UK online car resource, revealed how six different EVs are all projected to halve in value after 12 months and 10,000 miles. These include the Audi e-Tron GT, which plummeted by 49 percent from £107,675 ($138,000) to £54,700 ($70,100), and the Ford Mustang Mach-E, which fell by 52 percent from £59,325 to £28,575. According to the data, a Polestar 2 would also lose 52 percent of its £52,895 sticker price in just 12 months.

The Tesla Model 3 fared only slightly better, falling by 45 percent in its first 12 months and 10,000 miles, while the Porsche Taycan fell by 49 percent and the Hyundai Ioniq 5 lost exactly half in the same period. These prices are all based on a midspec version of each car, since factors like battery size, trim level, and even paint color can have a marked effect on trade-in value.

Miley Face

But do you know what has less of an impact on depreciation? Mileage. If the long-range Polestar 2 mentioned above had covered 20,000 miles in its first year instead of 10,000—well above the annual UK average of just 7,000—its estimated trade-in value falls by only an extra £975, or a further 2 percent of its original price.

It’s a similar story with the Taycan. A 4S model with the long-range battery fell from £100,200 to £50,700 in its first 12 months and 10,000 miles. But if it had covered 20,000 miles in the same year it would have fallen by only another £2,650. Or, after two years and 20,000 miles it would be worth £44,175, according to the Cap HPI data. Age (beyond the first 12 months) has a similarly insignificant effect. A 10,000-mile Taycan is worth £50,700 after one year, or £46,600 after two years.

YouTuber The MacMaster has been charting the decrease in value of his own two-year-old Taycan, which dropped from a new price of £120,000 down to a Porsche dealership valuation of £44,650 in March earlier this year, leaving him in negative equity as he still owes approximately £64,700 on the EV. To make matters worse, the Porsche dealership giving the valuation supposedly refused to take his Taycan.

Remember, these are all estimated trade-in values. You would expect to earn more by selling the car privately, and you’d see the same car advertised for more by a dealer to ensure they make a profit.

Depreciation of the Tesla Model 3 also slows significantly after the first year. Cap HPI data states how a 2023 Model 3 Long Range would fall from £50,000 to £27,550 after one year and 10,000 miles, then by only an additional £2,500 after two years and 20,000 miles. Had the first 10,000 miles been spread over 18 months instead of 12, the price would fall by only an extra £825 in those six months.

The ability for Tesla, and other EV manufacturers, to update and upgrade a car’s software months or even years after it left the factory should help with long-term depreciation. We’ve seen how Tesla can push out major user interface upgrades, and even add entirely new features, over the air. Back in 2019, Jaguar pushed out a software update that claimed to increase the range of its I-Pace by up to 8 percent, and in 2022 the Polestar 2 gained Apple CarPlay—a feature that manufacturers used to charge handsomely for—via a free OTA update.

EV vs. ICE

As we said earlier, heavy day-one depreciation has long been par for the car ownership course. But how do year-old EVs stack up against similar internally-combusted cars? And more specifically, what happens when you compare two cars of a similar size and price from the same manufacturer? Cap HPI data has the answers and, again, the results are best viewed sitting down.

When comparing a gas-powered Audi Q7 55 with an electric Audi e-tron 55 SUV, both one year old and with 10,000 miles, the gas-powered car is worth 42 percent more after 12 months, despite costing less when new.

This is also true with lower-value cars. Cap HPI data showed how, after three years and 30,000 miles, a gas-powered Volkswagen Golf has a 46 percent price premium over an electric Golf.

We expected to find a similar difference between the gas-powered Porsche Panamera and electric Porsche Taycan. However, Cap HPI data suggests similar, midlevel 4S variants of each lose a similar amount of value over two years and 20,000 miles. The Panamera fell from £93,140 to £63,250, while the Taycan dropped from £84,030 to £53,000.

Auto America

Now for the US prices. According to Edmunds, a 2022 Porsche Taycan Turbo with 10,000 miles (well under the US annual average of 14,000) was worth about $106,000 at the time of writing in July 2024. That’s about $50,000 below what it would have cost new, not including optional extras, which pump up the retail price but tend not to affect resale value.

Historical data produced by Edmunds shows how the car’s value briefly rose from $129,000 to almost $131,000 between August and October 2023, but has fallen markedly since, tumbling by as much as $4,000 per month between November 2023 and February 2024 before dropping a further $10,000 over the next five months.

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August 16, 2024
Dacia Spring EV (2024) Review: Excellent Value for an Urban EV

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Like a list? Here’s a good one for you. The cheapest car sold in the US right now is the Nissan Versa, which costs $16,680. For just $15 more you can have the Mitsubishi Mirage. This Dacia Spring, if it were sold in the US, would come in third at around $19,000.

Why mention the Dacia? Well, the Spring is not an internal-combustion auto, it’s a fully electric car. Yep, a proper road-legal, five-door EV—not a micro-car like the Wueling Mini or Zhidou Rainbow—and one that is about to hit the UK market at a starting price of less than £15,000 new.

If the Spring were available in the US, it would be the cheapest American-sold EV by a country mile, besting the Nissan Leaf by more than $9,000.

Who is Dacia? Good question. Pronounced “Dah-chee-ah,” it is a Romanian automaker that is part of the Renault group and known for cheap and cheerful cars that offer surprisingly good value. What’s more, its star has been on the rise for the last few years in Europe. As proof of this, I know of more than one professional car reviewer who has bought an all-wheel-drive Dacia Duster with—whisper it—their own money.

Now, thanks to an impressive new duo at the design helm, incoming Dacias have looks that belie their price point. Check out the new Duster, arriving in the UK in just a few months; or the possible seven-seat Bigster, landing next year to give the rest of the European SUV market a serious run for their money. The arrival of the all-electric Spring tantalizingly signals what’s to come from Dacia. If it carries on like this, you could be looking at the kind of brand rebirth Hyundai and Kia have enjoyed.

Cute, Capable

The urban-focused Spring embodies the Dacia approach to car making: There are no excessive frills, just the toys you need; the power is sufficient, because no one needs supercar speeds between traffic lights; and the range is acceptable for multiple city trips, not interstate missions.

Courtesy of Dacia

This, of course, is how the Spring manages to cost so little and weigh less than a tonne (984 kilograms), which we should remind you would be applauded for any internal combustion car—but this is an EV. It should be more expensive, and it should have more heft, but it doesn’t.

The weight saving also makes sense of the numbers, which at first glance look laughably small: From October, UK customers can plump for either a 44-bhp model or a 64-bhp one. The battery is just 26.8 kWh, but thanks to the lack of weight it’s good for 140 miles of range on either model. You don’t even need an EV wall box to charge this thing up, just plug it into a regular socket and it will be fully charged overnight (or under 11 hours).

If you do hook it up to a home 7-kW wall box, that fill-up will take around four hours, supposedly. The higher-powered Spring can manage 30 kW, and so with that “modest” battery you can go from 20 to 80 percent in an acceptable 45 minutes.

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August 5, 2024
How to Control Android Auto or Apple CarPlay With Your Voice While Driving

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A pretty major part of staying safe while driving is keeping your eyes on the road. When you need to take a call, switch playlists, or change the destination you’re navigating to, that’s not always easy. We should all pull over when these jobs need doing (or get a passenger to do them), but that doesn’t always happen.

By using your voice to interact with Android Auto or Apple CarPlay, you can get directions, look up information, and control media playback without moving your hands from the wheel or your eyes away from what’s ahead of you. Here’s how it’s done when you’re connected to Android Auto or Apple CarPlay in your vehicle.

Speaking to Android Auto

Enabling hands-free activation on Android Auto via a Pixel phone. (David Nield)

There are a few ways to get Android Auto to listen to you. One is to tap the microphone icon that appears at the side of the interface, alongside the list of recently used apps. Another is to press the voice command button on your car’s steering wheel, if there is one. It looks different in some cars, but it typically shows an illustration of a person’s face in profile, mouth open, with sound waves coming out of their mouth. (Check your vehicle’s documentation if you’re not sure.)

If you want to go completely hands-free and use a “Hey Google” prompt to get Android Auto to listen, you need to make sure voice prompts are enabled on your phone. From Settings, pick Connected devices > Connection preferences (Google Pixel phones) or just Connected devices (Samsung Galaxy phones), then Android Auto.

Choose ‘Hey Google’ detection and you’ll see two toggle switches—so you can either enable hands-free voice activation on your phone all of the time, or only when you’re driving. Note that if you haven’t already done so, enabling this feature will require you to record a few audio speech samples so your phone knows how to recognize you when you’re talking and making requests.

Speaking to Apple CarPlay

Enabling hands-free activation on Apple CarPlay via an iPhone. (David Nield)

As with Android Auto, there may be a voice command button on your car’s steering wheel that you can press before talking to Siri on Apple CarPlay. It depends on the make, model, and age of your vehicle, so if the voice control button doesn’t appear obvious, you may have to check in the manual to find it. (Look for the button with a picture of a person speaking.)

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August 3, 2024
You Won’t Believe What Car Headlights Have in Store

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Sure, duh: Vehicle lights serve the important and vital safety function of allowing drivers to see where they’re going, and everyone else to see when they’re coming. But for decades, car designers have clocked headlamps and tail lights as an opportunity for creativity, to build a distinctive brand that says, “Here comes that car.” Think of Lamborghini’s y-shaped headlights, or the almost menacing double barrels of the Dodge Challenger, or the halo rings on BMWs.

But a new era of car light design, ushered in by new technologies, powertrains, and even business models, has transformed the front profile of vehicles. “It’s been an incredible, critical acceleration in the last few years,” says César Muntada, the head of light design at Audi.

The result is lights that are brighter, thinner, and in more complex configurations than ever before. Lights that dance when a car is approached by its owner, lights that blink when it’s being charged. Lights that can be customized to fit personal taste, or even mood. Lights that even, if regulators allow them, won’t blind other drivers. In the future, cars might even use lights to communicate with others on the road.

Today, automakers are doubling down on unique headlight signatures, arguing that a car’s front is its most important bit in not only selling the vehicle to customers, but the idea of the vehicle—what it means.

“We call it a face,” says Tim Kozub, who directs Cadillac’s design team. “It relates back to us as humans. The front of the vehicle is the personality.” Internal Cadillac market research shows that people react first to a vehicle’s front, then its rear, and then its side view, he says. So car designers are spending even more time—and money—on getting the face just right.

Light It Up

In some ways, the story of the beautification of the vehicle headlight is the story of advances in light technology. In the mid-20th century, headlights were small, halogen bulbs inside a large eye. By the early 1990s, some automakers began using xenon or high-intensity discharge (HID) headlamps, which were more powerful, efficient, and lasted longer than halogen. At the turn of the century, automakers experimented with using different shapes and textures inside headlights.

Finally: Enter the LED. Starting with a 2007 Lexus, automakers began using the smaller, powerful, and even more long-lasting lights inside headlamps. Headlights no longer needed to be bulbs inside a large casing, says Raphael Zammit, the chair of the Transportation Design program at the College of Creative Studies.

The creativity has flowed from there. “We’ve moved away from the physical aspect of lamps and moved towards a very thin, minimalist perspective,” says Zammit. “You’re looking at lines, gestures of lines. LEDs have taken it to the next level.”

Just in the past few years, automakers including Mercedes-Benz, Audi, and Hyundai have introduced digital headlights, which use LEDs and vehicles’ increasingly sophisticated onboard computers to illuminate with even more specificity. Audi’s Matrix-design headlights can, for example, “greet” drivers with model-specific headlight animations, a kind of personalized hello enabled by advances in lighting.

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August 2, 2024
Rimac Verne Robotaxi: prices, availability, specs

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The Rimac Group describes Verne—its new autonomous ride-hailing service—as its “next impossible thing.” First, founder Mate Rimac established his eponymous electric hypercar company in Croatia, a country with no history of carmaking. That went well. Porsche, Hyundai and Softbank all took stakes. The Volkswagen Group gifted him a majority stake in Bugatti in return for access to his propulsion tech in future models.

Rimac Technology now supplies electric drivetrains to Porsche, BMW and Aston Martin, among many others, and it is developing advanced energy storage tech, too.

And now there’s Verne, Mate’s autonomous ride-hailing service launched today in Zagreb, the Croatian capital. Named after French novelist and futurist Jules Verne, it goes live in Zagreb first in 2026, followed by Manchester in the UK. Agreements have been signed to bring the service to another nine cities in Europe and the Middle East, and Verne is in talks to roll out to another 30 cities worldwide.

The sleek Verne robotaxi has twin sliding doors giving access to a two-seat cabin.

Photograph: Rimac

So can this ambitious but fast-moving start-up from a tiny nation do the near-impossible and get a robust robotaxi service in operation before most of the other players in this space—including Tesla, which reveals its own robotaxi in August?

Don’t bet against it. Verne was founded by Mate and two of his closest colleagues and friends: Marko Pejković, now CEO of Verne, and Adriano Mudri, the designer of Rimac Nevera hypercar and now chief design officer at Verne. The Rimac Group has a 55 per cent stake in Verne, with Saudi investors holding the rest.

The idea has been in development since at least 2019. Verne already employs 280 staff, and at its global launch revealed a complete-looking ecosystem of app, car and “mothership” buildings, to which the vehicles will return to be charged and cleaned.

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June 26, 2024
Bugatti’s Tourbillon 2024: Price, Specs, Availability

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The resurrection of Bugatti is one of the 21st century’s most notable automotive stories. Aristocratic, artistic, and more than a little arcane, Bugatti was a prewar marque that mastered luxury, design, and motorsport, the creator of Grand Prix winners, and arguably the most lavish motorcar ever made, in the shape of the early 1930s Type 41 Royale. Then it faded away.

It was the late Ferdinand Piëch, the monomaniacal kingpin of the Volkswagen Group, who bought the rights to the name and returned the brand to glory with 2005’s Veyron and its successor, the Chiron. The Super Sport version of the latter remains the world’s fastest production car, having achieved a top speed of 304.773 mph in the hands of racing driver Andy Wallace at a German test track in 2019.

How do you follow that—especially in a world in which 2,000-horsepower electric hypercars have comprehensively rearranged expectations?

As fate would have it, Bugatti is now controlled by Croatian EV powerhouse Rimac, as a result of a complex 2021 contra-deal with VW and Porsche. So you’d be right to wonder what kind of encore wunderkind Mate Rimac would devise for the 114-year-old French legend.

The result is the Tourbillon, an imperious super-coupé hybrid that sees Bugatti looking a hundred years ahead as much as it’s invoking its storied past—but not in the ways you’d expect.

The Tourbillon is Bugatti’s latest hybrid hypercar, the first to reveal Rimac’s influence on the manufacturer.

VIDEO: Bugatti

“Icons like the Type 57SC Atlantic, renowned as the most beautiful car in the world, the Type 35, the most successful racing car ever, and the Type 41 Royale, one of the most ambitious luxury cars of all time, provide our three pillars of inspiration,” Rimac says. “Beauty, performance, and luxury formed the blueprint for the Tourbillon; a car that was more elegant, more emotive, and more luxurious than anything before it. And just like those icons of the past, it wouldn’t be simply for the present, or even for the future, but pour l’éternité–for eternity.”

Yep, it’s safe to say Bugatti is pretty excited about it’s new creation and has an eye on the pristine lawns of the Pebble Beach or Villa d’Este concours events a century hence, positioning its new hypercar as both head-spinningly high-tech and as an artful riposte to built-in obsolescence.

Reskinning Rimac’s own brilliant and fully electric Nevera hypercar was surely one option, but Rimac is respectful enough of Bugatti’s history to know that would never fly. “So I came up with a proposal to make a completely new car,” he says. He’s come an awfully long way since being the sole employee of Rimac back in 2009.

Instruments of Success

The name Tourbillon will be familiar to adherents of haute horologie. Rather than honor a former Bugatti racing driver—as in Pierre Veyron and Louis Chiron—the new car references the most elaborate mechanism in watchmaking, a machine for the wrist whose complexity counteracts the effects of gravity in order to maintain the most accurate possible timekeeping.

The steering wheel of the new Bugatti Tourbillon spins around the central fixed instrument cluster.

VIDEO: Bugatti

Bugatti’s designers and engineers were seduced by the idea of mechanical timelessness when they were conceiving the new car, and thus the Tourbillon largely rejects large digital touchscreens in its interior in favor of machined components and a fully analogue skeletonized (another watch world reference) instrument cluster—though a small screen does slide into view if you want it, for Apple CarPlay or Android Auto.

The cluster consists of more than 600 parts, uses titanium, sapphire, and ruby in its construction, and remains fixed in place allowing the steering wheel to rotate around it. Two needles on the center dial display the engine’s revs and speed. On the left are analogue readouts for battery and oil temperature; on the right there’s a display showing the power drawn from the e-motors and engine.

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June 20, 2024
McLaren Artura Spider Hybrid 2024 Review: Performance Party

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While the world awaits Ferrari’s first all-electric car—due next year—archrival McLaren insists that the technology doesn’t yet exist to deliver an EV worthy of its name.

Power clearly isn’t the problem, but weight is the enemy in Woking, McLaren’s UK headquarters, and batteries aren’t getting lighter fast enough. Going fully electric results in unacceptable compromises to a car’s dynamics, McLaren says.

Light weight isn’t just a philosophy to these guys, it’s dogma, and, like all such things, that doesn’t suggest much in the way of progressive thinking. Until you arrive at a corner at, shall we say, a committed velocity in the new Artura Spider.

Few cars are as fluid, balanced, and rewarding as this, a lissome-looking machine, which soon has you thinking like a racing driver: Plotting entry, apex, and exit, dallying with a trailing throttle or trying to dial out understeer. It gets right under your skin.

McLaren doesn’t even rate fully electric steering as pure enough, and the Artura’s precision feel is undoubtedly helped by an old-school hydraulic setup. Apparently, it’s almost identical to the steering configuration in the 600 LT, which is nothing less than one of the greatest-handling cars ever made.

Pimped P1 Power

Photograph: McLaren Automotive

Yet it would be a grave error to mistake McLaren for a tech refusenik. Far from it. Core to the Artura’s astonishing athleticism is its carbon-composite chassis (MCLA for short), which delivers both tremendous structural integrity and impressive lateral bending stiffness.

It’s made in the company’s dedicated UK facility in Sheffield, and McLaren’s use of carbon fiber throughout its model range puts one over on Ferrari, Lamborghini and Porsche, all of whom reserve this costly material for their most expensive hypercars.

The Artura is also a hybrid, deepening the company’s expertise in an area it first explored on 2013’s ground-breaking P1. The combustion engine is a 3.0-liter twin turbo V6, harnessed here to an axial flux e-motor, which is integrated into the gearbox’s bell housing.

Improvements in the engine mapping have increased the overall power output to 690 brake horsepower, a rise of 20 bhp over Artura v1.0. Rather than a 90-degree V, the cylinders sit at a 120-degree angle, which reduces pressure losses in the exhaust. The twin turbos sit within in a “hot vee” configuration, which means they can spin faster with helpful consequences for throttle response.

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June 17, 2024
Alpine’s A290 EV Has a Built-In Gran Turismo-Style Driving Instructor

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Another win over its Renault 5 sibling is a multi-link rear suspension, which promises a pointy front end, while Alpine-engineered front and rear anti-roll bars should add further balance and poise.

Alpine has also spent time perfecting the feel of the brake pedal, promising an “imperceptible natural transition between regenerative braking at the beginning of the pedal travel and hydraulic braking”. Large Brembo units do much of the heavy lifting here, but we’ll let you know if this has been a success when we review the EV properly.

One stat as a result of this weight loss and superior brake setup is impressive, however: This EV can drop from 62 mph to a standstill in just 3 seconds—so interested parties should perhaps start training up their neck muscles.

Interior Tech

There are other ways Alpine is looking to engage the driver. There are four driving modes, Save, Normal, Sport and Personal, the last of which allows a customized throttle response, steering assistance and “Alpine Driving Sound”. The latter is a newly developed system, which accentuates the noise coming from the electric motor and pumps it through the audio system into the car. So, while there’s still trickery going on here, at least the noise generated isn’t entirely fake.

Speaking of audio, Alpine has patriotically partnered with Devialet, a respected French audiophile brand, for its sound system. An optional-extra package, it consists of a 615-watt amplifier, a 30 cm subwoofer and 9 loudspeakers. After a very brief listening session from the back seat, I was left impressed by the clarity of sound and the deep, but not overpowering bass. It’s definitely a box to tick on the spec list. As a side note, if you are over 5’ 9”, you will struggle for leg room in the back.

If you find yourself behind the wheel, you’ll notice the two large screens, which have become the standard for all new EVs. There’s a 10.1-inch central screen angled towards the driver, which displays the Google-based, but attractively Alpine-skinned, operating system. And for those who value tactility, there are a number of physical buttons below it to control the heating and air conditioning, but anyone hoping for Renault 5 Turbo-style speedometers and rev counters will be disappointed with the screen that replaces them.

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June 13, 2024
Xpeng G6 2024 EV Review: Great Value, But Uninspiring

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Xpeng prides itself on the technology of its cars. The G6 boasts 29 sensors—including five millimeter-wave radars, 12 ultrasonic wave radars, and 12 cameras—and runs on an Nvidia Orin-X processor with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8155P cockpit chip.

This is all used to run the in-house infotainment system (wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are coming via a software update later this year, apparently) and the company’s XPilot safety system. This includes all of the usual autonomous safety tech, like emergency braking, blind spot warnings, and traffic light recognition, plus lane-keep assist and the G6’s active cruise control. As with so many modern cars, the G6 sometimes misreads road signs and incorrectly warns its driver about being over the speed limit.

There is no European equivalent to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised). So while the G6 can be bought with lidar and more advanced semiautonomous driving in China, that’s missing from its EU offering.

As it stands, the system works well enough, but isn’t the most intuitive—our test car didn’t make any sort of sound to indicate when the system was enabled or disabled, and none of the steering wheel buttons used to manage speed and distance are labeled. The result is you’re going to mistake the volume control for the speed adjuster on your first outing.

Lastly, the voice assistant responded quickly to “Hey Xpeng,” but until its grasp of English is improved, it offers less functionality than in China. We asked it for the weather forecast, but it replied with the car’s range. Better was how it understood a passenger stating “I’m cold” and turned up the temperature on that side only.

Out in the Cold

Should you buy the Xpeng G6? Massive import tariffs mean Chinese cars remain off the menu in the US, but if you’re in Europe the G6’s competitive price could be appealing (but maybe not for much longer). It matches up to the Tesla Model Y in a lot of key aspects, and even exceeds its American rival when it comes to price, the upcoming inclusion of CarPlay and Android Auto, and ride quality.

But there’s still work to be done for the G6 to fully impress. It’s disappointing that we couldn’t try out the major UI update, called version 15, that’s due to roll out in July. But that at least demonstrates Xpeng is keen to quickly evolve, even if that means swapping out the entire mapping system for an alternative and reworking the user interface layout to accommodate smartphone casting. We applaud that, and look forward to seeing what other tech upgrades it has planned.

All that said, the G6 left us cold. It carries a lot of kit for the price, and a visit to Xpeng’s cavernous Dutch showroom suggests it means business, literally parking itself between Kia and Nio. It also has a roadmap for infrastructure expansion, partnering with existing service center groups to give buyers peace of mind. But there’s little here to really set the G6 apart from high-quality rivals like the Kia EV6, Hyundai Ioniq 5, Škoda Enyaq, Ford Mustang Mach-E, and of course, the Tesla Model Y.

Upstarts need to offer something new. Tesla’s Supercharger network drew in customers during its early years; Nio offers battery swapping; BYD already had enormous scale on its side before entering Europe.

For now, Xpeng feels like an also-ran. The G6 is a par-for-the-course EV that will appeal to drivers who want exactly this combination of size, range, price, and fast charging but don’t care about the badge. If that’s you, fine, but for now the G6 does little to get WIRED truly excited.

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June 11, 2024