It's because with the $12,000 model you're sitting on a sheet of plastic with a steering wheel made out of the same material used by Little Tikes to make their products. I said $25k because I was referring to the 'fully loaded' model (i.e. the one you see in those pictures with actual cloth and stuff). It's one of those things where they want to be able to say they've got the cheapest car in the US market, but in reality they don't.
Oh, you're talking about the Electric Drive. Everywhere I see except their homepage says 25k. I think they're just trying to trick people into spending twice as much money or something, somebody needs to be fired for that dumbassery.
Oh, you know what? I think I figured it out. First, they're taking the Federal Tax Incentive out of the price (7.5k) so that bumps it down to 18k. Then I bet you they average out the price of gas people would use in a given year or two and subtract that from the price as part of their stuffty marketing campaign for electric drive.
Even sketchier, they have one of those [1] citation marks next to their price claim of $12k. Sweet, we get to see their logic. It doesn't actually go anywhere. It's not a link, and there's nowhere on the page that enumerates on this figure. BOOM. Got it. You have to scroll ALL THE WAY TO THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE, and click the TINY ARROW next to "legal terms" (what the forget?) to expand that information.
Okay, so that's what it is. There's this thing called "Battery Assurance Plus" which means you rent the loving battery. It's essentially a stuffty marketing campaign to trick you into paying more money to them over time for the battery instead of paying for it up front, and their justification is that if your battery breaks you get a new one for free. Here's a surprise: batteries are pretty well understood technology by now. Unless the company is sabotaging the batteries, there's absolutely no reason to pay this inflated rate to 'rent' the battery. So your $12k figure is to buy the car at first, then you gotta pay like $100 a month for the battery for 10 years. Fantastic. So, 25k - 7.5k = 17.5k. Since their price figure is 12.5k, that means the battery costs ~$5k. 12 months * 10 years = 120 months of paying $80 plus tax (comes out to about $90). That's $10,800. You'd have to have your battery replaced twice to make this worth it, and frankly if the battery can't last more than 3 years it's probably not a smart investment.
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