Renault wants that sweet, sweet Chinese market, and it wants it bad. So the French company has hit Auto Shanghai with a cute little electric city car styled to charm the Asian market and ready to go on sale by the end of 2019.
If you want to sell electric cars right now, China is the place to focus your energies. It's the world's biggest market for EVs, and it's also growing faster than anywhere else. Laying out a plan to snag Chinese sales to the tune of 550,000 per year by 2022, Renault has presented its first A-segment electric, the City K-ZE.
There's no information yet on power output - which Geely's Geometry A shows isn't really a priority in China. Nor on battery capacity, which is probably also much lower on the average Chinese commuter's priority list than folks contemplating the endless highways of Utah, for example. Electrics get their best mileage in stop-start traffic, and China has no shortage of that.
We do know it'll offer 50-minute quick charges and 4-hour slow charges plugged into a wall socket, that it rocks an 8-inch touchscreen, responds to voice commands and pumps out Wi-Fi to passengers through its 4G internet connection. It'll have a rear facing camera and tire pressure monitoring system. And while it doesn't have an air filtration system like the Geometry A or Tesla cars, it does keep an eye on air quality outside the vehicle, and will switch between interior and exterior air circulation depending on where it's easiest to breathe.
Renault is manufacturing this little beastie in China as part of a deal the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance has struck with China's Dongfeng, but Renault is hasty to add that "rigorous global quality standards" will be upheld. This manufacturing alliance will be responsible for producing no less than nine Renault cars by 2022, three of which will be electrics.
Pricing and availability are yet to be announced, but in the meantime there's plenty more photos in the gallery.
Source: Renault