The e-boxer has been around for quite a while, but not in the US because there are too many people that whine about anything that doesn’t get astronomically better mileage than their “regular” vehicles.
Crazy to see how far ahead Europe and especially China are with EVs.
BTW, for anyone interested, here's a quick read on just the EV factory they will be building:
Subaru will build its first EV factory in Japan later this decade to support surging demand in North America. It's first electric vehicle, the Solterra, is currently built by Toyota.
www.autoblog.com
"TOKYO — Subaru Corp aims to build a dedicated electric vehicle (EV) factory in Japan in the late 2020s, it said on Thursday, as part of a $1.9 billion ramp-up to respond to surging demand for battery cars in its main North American market.
Subaru has long had a strong presence in the United States and on Thursday warned that its U.S. dealers only have a record low stockpile of around 5,000 vehicles left, reflecting the squeeze of a supply-chain crunch.
It plans to launch a mixed-production line of gasoline and electric vehicles around 2025 before opening an EV-only production line in the new factory after 2027, it said. The move would be a first for Subaru. Other Japanese automakers have yet to formally announce plans to build a dedicated EV factory.
Japan's automakers are accelerating their EV production in an attempt to recover ground lost to Tesla Inc, now the leader in the fastest growing segment of the auto industry."
"The market for EVs has been changing very rapidly over the past year," said Subaru CEO Tomomi Nakamura.
It plans to invest 250 billion yen ($1.93 billion) over the next five years to bolster electrification.
The vehicles produced in the new factory would be exported overseas, Nakamura said, declining to reveal specifics about production capability and whether it would make
Toyota Motor Corp cars.
The announcement came on the same day that Subaru began accepting orders for its first mass-produced EV, the
Solterra, developed jointly with
Toyota in Japan. Subaru, however, outsourced the car's production to Toyota, which has also just rolled out its first battery
electric car, the
bZ4X.
Separately, Subaru reported a 12% drop in full-year operating profit to 90.45 billion yen ($701 million). For the current financial year that began in April, it forecast operating profit of 200 billion yen, more than double the year just ended.
($1 = 129.0300 yen)
(Reporting by Satoshi Sugiyama; Editing by David Dolan and Edmund Klamann)
