Electric microcars: niche or need? A market analysis to understand if electric quadricycles can become the new urban vehicle

Carlos Tavares, Chief Executive Officer of Stellantis, did not mince words: ‹‹The freedom to move is constantly under attack. This is essentially a European issue: in other parts of the world the approach is different››. Increasing city traffic restrictions, the new emissions standard Euro 7, the ICE ban expected in 2035, the supply chain shortages, and the volatility of raw materials’ prices represent a serious threat to the possibility to afford and use a car, so to the people’s freedom of mobility. It is sufficient to analyze the entry price of a Fiat Panda – the best seller car in Italy – to find out it increased by more than fifty percent in the last ten years. The market analysis at the beginning of this work shows that other popular European models have been involved by a similar trend; and a lot of compact, cheap cars have already been dropped or will soon be discontinued – exactly those cars that motorized millions of people. Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) are currently the sole mid-to-long-term solution established for Europe, and people will have to switch to this technology to satisfy their urban mobility needs. However, considering that the cheapest BEV available, the Dacia Spring, costs more than twenty thousand euros (list price, in Italy), and that the average income has not followed at all the rush of new cars prices, many European citizens might not be able to afford one of them. For these reasons, the market, the OEMs and the entire automotive industry are facing a truly delicate challenge: making sure that even the less well-off people can afford an electric car requires 360-degrees efforts, involving technologies as well as content – perhaps reverting to greater frugality, as it was in the past century. The need for innovation to bring the cost of the electric vehicles’ technology up to that of a mature one like ICE is undeniable; yet, one possible solution for ensuring individual mobility in the city context for as many people as possible is electric quadricycles, and the success of the Citroën Ami corroborates this hypothesis. Despite taking the concept of simplicity almost to an extreme, electric quadricycles could be the perfect answer for everyday urban commuting. Thus, the core of this dissertation starts describing which are the quadricycles categories and their main prescriptions within the European legislative framework. Subsequently, it continues with an overview on the currently available models, providing the main technical specifications, the list prices, and the government purchase incentive programs at the present time; also, a simple total cost of ownership calculation is presented to compare a reference electric quadricycle with the cheapest electric car now available. This work ends with a chapter dedicated to support why these vehicles can be the right choice for micro-mobility needs. Indeed, thanks to the very small size and basic equipment, engineering requirements are much lower than those of passenger cars, which allows to adopt electric powertrains of limited size and power. In particular, the small battery packs installed on quadricycles reduce the related raw materials demand, inside a short-to-medium-term scenario where such minerals are quite critical considering geopolitical dependencies and supply shortages risks; at the same time, the complete charging time is reduced, which makes slow AC power charging appropriate with all the benefits in terms of costs and impacts on the electric power network.