Forget about range anxiety and charging—the real barrier to EV adoption is affordability. The market badly needs a better selection of lower-priced EVs, but they’re mighty slow in coming.
Hyundai has several more affordable EVs in the pipeline—the new 2024 Kona Electric is expected to have a starting price under $33,000. The IONIQ 3 is now expected to hit the streets in 2027.
Hyundai Europe’s VP of marketing, Andreas-Christoph Hofmann, told Automotive News that his company is developing another budget-priced model, the IONIQ 2. “Everybody in the industry knows the target of this kind of vehicle is 20,000 euros [about $22,000],” he said.
The 2 and the 3 will use Hyundai’s new Integrated Modular Architecture (IMA) platform, which the company has called “a significant advance” over its current E-GMP platform, and will help reduce costs. The IMA platform will support six different types of battery packs, some based on an LFP chemistry and others using an NCM chemistry. All these packs will operate at 800 volts.
Other automakers are also hoping to bring prices down, and they may have the wind at their backs thanks to several trends. Raw material prices have dropped over the past year or so, and are projected to continue falling as more production comes online. Battery prices have resumed their usual downward trajectory—pack-level costs reached a record low of $139 per kWh last month, according to BloombergNEF, which predicts they will fall to $113/kWh in 2025 and $80/kWh by 2030. Automakers continue to embrace lower-cost battery chemistries such as LFP, and they continue to explore new, more efficient manufacturing processes.
Source: Electrek
