DarthPuppy wrote:
I think the present price point is viable thanks to incentives. The ICE Golf starts at $20k. The e-Golf starts at $29k. With the federal and California incentives, the e-Golf can be had for a net $19k. And then you have all of the savings of not having to buy gas, do oil changes, longer lasting brakes, etc. And my commute would benefit greatly from HOV access if that is still available.
The flip side is the likely fast depreciation. But that only really bites you if you sell it or it gets into an accident and the insurance sticks you with a small check. Granted, one could reasonably expect an ICE Golf to run 10-20 years and go 200k+ miles. So we aren't apples-apples. In theory, the e-golf should be able to do that too, just with replacing the batteries, which is probably less than the gas, oil changes, etc. accumulate to by the time the battery needs to be changed. However, as noted elsewhere on this forum, people are reluctant to invest in batteries for a number of reasons.
The above of course assumes VW doesn't jack the price up on the 2017.
The % of potential customers who will qualify to get the full incentives, especially the federal tax credit, will decrease once the price drops below $30k. There was an article a while back at IEVS, GCR or one of the other EV websites which said that the size of the potential market doubles (or halves) for every $5k change in the price up or down. I believe all the companies selling PEVs have factored incentives into their MSRPs, and I expect that once the incentives go away the MSRPs will drop considerably. I imagine they hope they'll be able to make a profit at the lower price by then.