Coda EV's Price as Big as its Battery Pack: $44,900
The brash startup Coda Automotive has priced its electric sedan, and it will be a whopping $44,900 before federal or state subsidies, which is almost $12,000 more than the Nissan Leaf and also more than the "range extender" Chevrolet Volt. The company faces quite a marketing effort to get people to pay that much for a small battery sedan with restrained styling, and lacking the super-car performance of the Tesla Roadster or Fisker Karma.
The price is in many ways dictated by the size of Coda's battery pack. The 34-kilowatt pack, obtained through Coda's joint operating agreement with Tianjin Lishen in China, is very big for its class. That adds range, but it also adds cost. "The battery is your single highest priced component," said Tom Reichenbach, the ex-Ford chief engineer at Coda rival Aptera. "If it's big, your car is going to be priced quite high."
The Tesla Roadster pack, 54-kilowatt-hours, is reportedly a $30,000 piece of hardware, but the company has taken the novel approach of offering consumers a pre-paid replacement unit for just $12,000.
According to Kevin Czinger, Coda's CEO, the company didn't have much choice when it comes to price. "We are an independent company that needs to make money on the car we put out," he told me. Coda will now start taking $499 refundable deposits on its sedan.
Coda's approach will be to stress the car's technical advantages. "We think the vehicle is significantly differentiated in terms of its performance, particularly our 34 kilowatt-hour battery system with 40 percent more usable energy than the competition, best-in-class range across seasons, and a 6.6-kilowatt onboard charger which is twice as fast as the competition," Czinger said.
The stated ranges of the Coda and the Leaf aren't that different, but Czinger says he can get to 120 miles per charge in the real world, and that the car will deliver something like that even if the car is driven regularly on the freeway (not a strong point of most EVs). And he also points to the active thermal management that protects his battery system.
"We designed the vehicle to meet the minimum requirements that we believe will meet people's day-to-day driving needs and [we] think consumers will enjoy driving and owning the vehicle."
OK, but Coda's problem will be getting consumers to care about things like thermal management when they don't really know much at all about electric cars. In the absence of a lot of hard information, people will be buying on price and also familiarity â€" the Leaf, the Volt and other major OEM cars will be all over television. Coda can't compete with that, though it is planning an extensive Internet-based marketing campaign.
Yes, the Coda will be eligible for subsidies, including a $7,500 federal income tax credit, but so will all the competition. The Leaf is also addressing sticker shock by subsidizing garage-based chargers in select markets through the federally supported EV Project.
I've spent time with Kevin Czinger, and consider him an exceptionally able executive, and also the kind of salesman who could market ice to Eskimos. He very ably raised $24 million from investors that included some of his colleagues from Goldman Sachs. If he were in the showroom, I'd probably walk out with the title to a Coda, wondering what had hit me. But Coda isn't going to have showrooms, just some dedicated display spots around California, where it starts selling the car in December. Coda also wants to build a battery plant in Ohio with Department of Energy help, and it plans to sell some cars there, too.
Coda wants to sell 14,000 cars annually, but that's a big goal. I'm very interested to see what incentives the company will roll out to increase its profile, sweeten the deal, and start racking up sales.
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Photo: Coda Automotive