VW up! Electric Car

March 21st, 2013 by Zachary Shahan

While Volkswagen has announced a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle Golf and the world’s most efficient car recently, the car below is the German company’s first all-electric car. And isn’t it cute.

Sister site Gas2 writes:

As if the Volkswagen pp! wasn’t frugal enough, the engineers at VW have decided to create an all-electric version of the tiny city car: the e-up!…

An electric motor will power the up! with 81 horsepower. While this is more than the normal 74 horsepower model, the electric version will be slower, owing to the additional weight of the battery pack. A 0-62 time of 14 seconds is slow whichever way you look at it, but it’s unlikely that up! buyers will have speed anywhere near their list of priorities. Top speed is just 84mph, but the car does have a respectable 155lb/ft of torque, which is available immediately.

A full charge of the 18.7kWh battery will give the little car a range of slightly more than 90 miles…. According to Volkswagen, 80 percent charge is reachable in just half an hour of being plugged in, which is quite impressive.

For some more details, check out the Gas2 post.

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Tags: no post, volkswagen, volkswagen e up!, volkswagen electric cars, Volkswagen Electric Vehicles, volkswagen up!, vw

About the Author

Zachary Shahan spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as the director/chief editor. Otherwise, he's probably enthusiastically fulfilling his duties as the director/editor of Solar Love, EV Obsession, Planetsave, or Bikocity. Zach is recognized globally as a solar energy, electric car, and wind energy expert. If you would like him to speak at a related conference or event, connect with him via social media. You can connect with Zach on any popular social networking site you like. Links to all of his main social media profiles are on ZacharyShahan.com.

Otis11

Wow, so you can charge a 72 mile range in 30 minutes! That’s pretty good!
Derek Bolton

e-up!? Are they using a marketing company from Yorkshire?
Madan Rajan

Finally Germans are getting into Electric Cars. Hope Volkswagen prices it affordably.

Its also very important that Germans don’t use coal to run these cars. Last year Germany’s coal consumption increased.
http://notrickszone.com/2013/01/12/germanys-green-energiewende-energy-transition-has-only-led-to-greater-coal-consumption/

Meanwhile Chinese are building Gen-4 reactor and this could provide cheap clean energy.

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/ENF-Chinese_HTGR_fuel_plant_under_construction-2103134.html
- http://zacharyshahan.com/ Zachary Shahan
  
  EVs are much greener than even the most efficient gas-powered cars even when charged on a dirty grid. However, Germany’s grid is one of the cleanest in the world, and is getting cleaner every day, so i don’t think that’s a concern.
  http://cleantechnica.com/2012/04/18/electric-vehicles-greenhouse-gas-emissions-save-money/
  http://cleantechnica.com/tag/germany/
http://www.facebook.com/rhodomel.meads Rhodomel Meads

you don’t fully charge your battery…. that’s very bad for its life.
you also don’t fully discharge your battery … it can become a total brick like the Tesla.

To have a battery achieve longer life, you maintain and operate within State Of Charges, the upper limit not reaching full recharge, and not going below the lower limit of energy that needs to be left in the battery. While the battery may be 18.7kWh, it will not be used fully, or else you ruin the battery quickly.

So what really is the useful working kWh of this battery? Why do Reporters never read the fine print about this very important information?
jburt56

How many miles or km per kWh?
- Ronald Brakels
  
  Should be more. Maybe 9 to 10 kilometres per kilowatt-hour as I would expect the minimum normal charge to be about 20% of the battery pack’s total capacity.