[pascalmahe]

My French bias is going to show but I wonder how Renault's Zoe is doing. It's been out for 6 years. Granted, Renault is completely absent from the US market and the car is uh... really not marketable for the US (it's tiny).

[xedeon]

Not too good I'm afraid. Renault is already FCF negative.

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2019/10/18/renault-facing-trouble...

Their long time partner Nissan is facing troubles too:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-25/nissan-s-...

[clouddrover]

It's sold 35k units so far in 2019 up to September:

http://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2019/10/global-top-20-september...

And there's a new revision of the Zoe coming out soon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64iJj3HTnMQ

[baq]

i've been driven in one and it was very surprising how nice it was; the price was completely prohibitive though.

[random_kris]

I've test drived Renault Zoe. It was my first electric car driving expirience and I was amazed... Too bad it doesn't offer enough for its price.

[thefounder]

I don't believe Renault makes Zoe to sell. They make the model for compliance with EU regulations.

[harperlee]

Madrid has zoes for carsharing through the zity app and frankly they are perfect for the city and nearby roads.

[bonzini]

Same in Italy, electric car sharing is exclusively using Zoe's.

[rasz]

Who owns the car sharing company? Is it an Energy company by any chance? a coal plant owning Energy company?

[bonzini]

It's owned by the train company.

[moccachino]

I'm curious, how do the regulations incentivize making a model that they don't really need to sell much of?

[fstephany]

From what I understand, carmakers have average emissions quota across their whole range (95g/km of CO by 2021).

Having electric vehicles in the range is a way to meet the quota even if they don't sell really well.

[moccachino]

Oh ok, I'd heard about the emissions quota, but I always thought it wasn't a simple average of the offered range, but was surely weighted by sales.

[yorwba]

It is weighted by number of new registrations: https://www.eea.europa.eu/highlights/average-co2-emissions-f...

If a car manufacturer actually makes and registers low-emission cars just to keep the average of their fleet down, there's not really a point in just having them sit around collecting dust, so they might as well sell them.

[isoprophlex]

Really? Aren't sales numbers way too high for this strategy? Like, multiple tens of thousands sold?

Compare this to the ridiculous fiat 500e at barely 2k sold...