Mitsubishi to contend for electric vehicle price leader spot
We don’t tend to talk a lot about Mitsubishi in our articles about electric vehicles, however that might start to change in the future as the company has said that it is ready to offer electric vehicles at an affordable price.
Mitsuyoshi Hattari, the Outlander project development manager, has recently claimed that his company has been working on future-proofing its technologies which relate to electric vehicles in order to keep ahead of their rival manufacturers.
When asked whether he’d like to see an electric power version offered across all Mitsubishi models, Hattari-san we very optimistic, confirming that there will be a new version of the Lancer EV coming soon, while there are also some rumors that the Lancer Evolution could replace its turbocharger with an electric motor or motors to increase its performance.
Despite this optimism even Hattari-san agrees that a case for pure electric vehicles, even in the light and small car classes, cannot yet be made, because at the current time models such as the Mirage or the Lancer would work better as hybrids or plug-in electric vehicles.
The concomitant use of an internal combustion engine to power the batteries that run an electric motor means that less batteries have to be used, which is arguably one of the main reasons for the high price of current electric vehicles.
But it’s only a matter of time till both the technology and the demand is in place to lower the price of batteries and also increase their efficiency; Hattari-san agrees with this opinion as well, likening the current pricing to that of LCD televisions which when first appeared were incredibly expensive but today they are available at only a fraction of that initial massive cost.
It now is mostly a question of how long till the volume starts to be on the side of the electric vehicle in order to start driving the prices down.
