Kia officially launched the 2025 Ray EV in Korea with the same low starting price of under $21,000. However, the new model year gains additional features. With incentives, the entry-level electric car can be bought for as little as $15,000 (20 million won).
The “New Kia Ray” was reborn as an entry-level EV last year. After opening pre-orders last August, starting at around $20,500 (27.35 million won), the Kia Ray EV secured over 6,000 reservations in less than a month.
Absolutely not. All the cars you list have decent to excellent range.
The argument was primarily used early on in marketing to try to sell cars that were basically only fit as city cars. Cars with LESS than 100km range.
Obviously they didn’t sell well, and this was tried for years until Tesla came out with the model S.
Then the competition scrambled, and made semi real cars, but still with less than 200km range. For instance Nissan Leaf and Renault Fluence, Even BMW came out with an i3 model as recently as 2020 that had below 200km range, despite being quite expensive!
Today most even cheap EV cars have better than 200km range, and that may be more relevant, but the batteries have gotten cheaper, so I’m not sure it makes sense to make cars with below 300 km range anymore.
With Your Ioniq 6 the small version has 55 Kwh battery, which AFAIK is the lowest on your list with about 400km range. The models with the bigger77 kWh have about 600 km range. More than enough and would be absolutely fantastic for me.
The 400km is just short of what I want, which can usually be done with about 60 kWh battery.
AFAIK all the cars you list also have decent fast charging, something small battery cars like Stelantis have been behind on too. So if the battery isn’t big enough for your trip, you are likely to spend way more time charging, than just the difference in battery size.
Despite there is truth in what you write, we see the FIAT 500 which is probably about the cheapest EV in Denmark currently, it doesn’t sell probably because of its sub 300km range. The same is true for every other Stelantis EV that should be pretty popular if you look at how the brands have usually sold here.
I wouldn’t call a single car you list short range, and even the shortest range on your list as far as I can tell, exceeds your daily needs by a factor 4.
Basically all your listed cars would be good enough. I could probably live with 400km instead of 450km if it was a good deal.
Obviously other people have other use cases, and maybe 300km is good enough for most, once they get used to it. It could even be less, if/when charging becomes as fast and easy as filling gas (gasoline).
So which of the Ioniq 6 was it? 53 or 77 kWh?
Edit PS:
Another reason for longer range than needed for daily use, is that on Motorway (highway with 130 km/h speedlimit) the range is shorter by as much as 30%, and in Winther it’s also shorter by about as much. So in Winter on Motorway you risk having only half the rated range. That would require 3 charges for my longest monthly trip of about 500km. And compared to our ICE car, it would take more than an hour extra to make the drive, because your have to drive slower to not use too much battery, and you need to stop about 3 times 15 minutes for charging.