Electric Volkswagen e-Up! gets a price CUT – but it’s still far too expensive

Electric Volkswagen e-Up! gets a price CUT

The Volkswagen e-Up! – VW’s electric Up! CityC ar – gets a price cut of £2,935 and additional equipment as VW tries to keep EV sale going.

As today’s earlier story made clear, VW are on a mission to be a fluffy green maker of electric cars in the wake of dieselgate, although at the moment you can only have an electric e-Golf and an electric e-Up! City Car.

The e-Golf is a pretty decent shout, but we’ve always had an issue with the electric e-Up! which is ridiculously expensive and seems aimed only at electric evangelists who really don’t care they’re throwing money away.

We’re guessing sales of the e-Up! are pretty poor, so with the need to be seen as a maker of appealing electric cars VW has decided to cut the price of the e-Up! and chuck in some extra equipment in an effort to make it more appealing.

The headline is that the list price of the e-Up! drops to £23,115 – a saving of £2,935 – which, say VW, is the equivalent of a price cut of £3,250 when you factor in the equipment tweaks. After PICG, the VW e-Up now costs from £19,615.

What you get is a pretty good City Car, but what drives it isn’t exactly appealing, with an 18.7kWh battery pack delivering an official range of 83 miles (and a real world range of 66 miles) making it pretty useless for anything other than as a local shopping trolley. A very expensive shopping trolley at that.

So ignore the e-Up! and grab yourself an entry-level Up! for less than half the price of the e-Up!, or go daft and grab an Up! GTI and still save £5.5k.