Photo: Volkswagen
Including the plug-in grant from the government, the e-up! now retails at £19,615 in the United Kingdom. If you go into the Which Model? page on the Volkswagen website, you’ll also notice the price without the incentive stands at £23,115 for the five-door electric city car.
The question is, why did the Wolfsburg-based automaker slash £2,935 from the price of the previous model year? The realignment makes the car “even more affordable” according to EV product manager Joe Laurence, but that's not entirely the truth. To the point, the e-up! is not competitive enough against more modern rivals from Nissan and Hyundai.
Including the additional features that come as standard, the 2019 Volkswagen e-up! boasts overall savings of £3,250 compared to the preceding model. The equipment in question comes in the guise of redesigned upholstery, height adjustments for the driver’s seat, and a parking camera.
As ever, the smallest EV from Volkswagen comes with an 18.7-kWh battery that powers up an electric motor which drives the front wheels. Charging takes as long as nine hours from a household plug. Using the optional 3.6-kWh wall box drops the charging time to six hours while a fast-charge station can replenish the charge level to 80 percent in half an hour.
Care to guess how much range the e-up! has under the Worldwide Harmonized Light Vehicle Test Procedure? Make that 83 miles (134 kilometers), which is lousy for a vehicle that went on sale for the 2019 model year. Coincidence or not, e-up! sales in the UK aren’t rosy either.
As a whole, Volkswagen isn’t much to the liking of the British public because of the horrendous dealership experience, including the after-sales part of ownership. Part of the problem is that dealers blame Volkswagen for this fiasco, and the other part is that Volkswagen blames UK dealers for lack of respect towards the customer.
Even though the market is contracting and Volkswagen is losing ground, the German automaker made it in the top ten best-selling vehicles in the United Kingdom in October 2018 with three nameplates. These are the Golf (3,765 units, ranked second), Tiguan (3,297 units, ranked fourth), and Polo (2,753 units, ranked tenth).
Including the additional features that come as standard, the 2019 Volkswagen e-up! boasts overall savings of £3,250 compared to the preceding model. The equipment in question comes in the guise of redesigned upholstery, height adjustments for the driver’s seat, and a parking camera.
As ever, the smallest EV from Volkswagen comes with an 18.7-kWh battery that powers up an electric motor which drives the front wheels. Charging takes as long as nine hours from a household plug. Using the optional 3.6-kWh wall box drops the charging time to six hours while a fast-charge station can replenish the charge level to 80 percent in half an hour.
Care to guess how much range the e-up! has under the Worldwide Harmonized Light Vehicle Test Procedure? Make that 83 miles (134 kilometers), which is lousy for a vehicle that went on sale for the 2019 model year. Coincidence or not, e-up! sales in the UK aren’t rosy either.
As a whole, Volkswagen isn’t much to the liking of the British public because of the horrendous dealership experience, including the after-sales part of ownership. Part of the problem is that dealers blame Volkswagen for this fiasco, and the other part is that Volkswagen blames UK dealers for lack of respect towards the customer.
Even though the market is contracting and Volkswagen is losing ground, the German automaker made it in the top ten best-selling vehicles in the United Kingdom in October 2018 with three nameplates. These are the Golf (3,765 units, ranked second), Tiguan (3,297 units, ranked fourth), and Polo (2,753 units, ranked tenth).
Google News