The Vauxhall Ampera costs £28,995 - even after the taxpayer chips in £5k
Vauxhall has revealed that the range-extender Vauxhall Ampera will cost £33,995 when it launches in 2012.
Sensibly, Vauxhall has chosen to reveal the price of the range-extender Vauxhall Ampera on the day it was included on the list of cars eligible for the £5,000 taxpayer subsidy for plug-in cars. Vauxhall will be getting £33,995 for every Ampera they shift, although the buyer will pay £28,995 thanks to the taxpayer subsidy.
Which, whether you pick the subsidised price or the actual price, is an awful lot of money. Yes, you can plug the Ampera in to the mains and get enough juice – if you leave it there for four hours – to travel for fifty miles (although the EPA in the US say the range is actually just 35 miles). And that fifty miles will only cost you a bit over £1. Cheap motoring by any measure.
The trouble is, the bulk of that cheap motoring is because electricity isn’t being taxed in the same way as petrol and diesel. If it were, the savings wouldn’t be as dramatic. But for savings like that buyers will probably put up with the fifty mile electric-only range and the four hour top-up time.
But it will take a huge mileage to even start to make a dent in the purchase price. Even though the range-extender is by far the most practical of the hybrid solutions it is still a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Take away the 35-50 miles of EV ability and the rest of the time you’ll get 44mpg.
For half the money of an Ampera you could buy a 1.6 diesel Focus with similar performance but which does 62mpg and has a range of twice that of the Ampera. If you did just 35 miles a day in the Focus it would cost you £3 a day instead of a £1 in the Ampera. The difference in list price of the Ampera and Focus is £16,000. So it would take 8,000 days to recover the extra cost of the Ampera.
That’s 22 years.
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