AVTOVAZ made an electric Lada Vesta

The largest and leading Russian automaker, AvtoVAZ, has completed testing of the first prototype of the Lada Vesta EV electric vehicle. This was reported by the corporate publication of the auto giant "Volzhsky Carriage Works".

According to the publication, the Lada Vesta EV sedan has a 60 kW electric motor (about 82 hp) and a lithium-ion battery. With this electric motor, the electric Vesta accelerates from standstill to 100 km / h in 15.5 seconds, and its maximum speed reaches 150 km / h. It takes nine hours to charge the battery from the household network, and about 1 hour at a special, more powerful charging station. ,3 hours. On one battery charge, the electric Lada Vesta EV can travel more than 150 km.

This is not the first Lada with an electric motor - the first was the El Lada station wagon, developed on the basis of the first Lada Kalina. Compared to the ElLada, Vesta EV offers "a fundamentally new level of comfort and safety for the driver and passengers." For example, when creating a sedan, a safety switch was used to turn off the current in the car in the event of a repair or an accident.

In addition, the design of the space under the front cover of the Lada Vesta EV is fundamentally different from that of the electric Kalina, and the traction batteries are located in two places - in front under the hood and under the rear seat.

Whether the electric Vesta will go into mass production has not yet been decided. But it is more than clear that such an environmentally friendly car cannot be cheap. The price of Lada Vesta EV will be about 40 thousand dollars or about 2 million 900 thousand rubles at today's exchange rate.

This is a little scary, considering that the cheapest Lada Vesta with a gasoline engine costs 514,000 rubles. For a well-equipped sedan with extras - Lux equipment with all options and an automatic transmission, you need 677,000. This means that the electric version of the Lada Vesta will cost four times more than the petrol one!

At the same time, Mitsubishi i-MiEV, officially offered on the Russian market, is much cheaper - 999,000 rubles. Naturally, the electric Lada Vesta is much larger than the Japanese car - it is larger and is a sedan, not a hatchback.

This year, several more copies of the electric vehicle will be released for testing, and the possible production of Vesta EV will be organized based on possible requests from the marketing department of the Russian auto giant. The future of electric vehicles not only in Russia, but also in the world will depend entirely on demand, which is not least dictated by the presence of a developed network of charging stations.

AvtoVAZ representatives believe that Vesta EV has a very high export potential. According to them, "Lada Vesta EV will become a strong competitor to analogues in the market price niche up to 40 thousand dollars." At the same time, municipal authorities and the Government of the Russian Federation are showing traditional interest in electric vehicles. We also believe that Vesta EV has a huge export potential due to a more attractive price with the same and even higher consumer qualities than competitors.” - commented on the future of the electric car, the head of the department of innovative projects of the engineering service of AvtoVAZ Konstantin Kotlyarov.

The issue of infrastructure development for the development of electric transport - the expansion of the network of charging stations is very favorably considered by the Government of the Russian Federation. Last September, it was announced that by the end of 2018 there would be a network of more than a thousand electric vehicle charging stations across the country.