How Olinia Turns Mexico's EV Ambition into Reality
Mexico is launching Olinia, a federally backed electric vehicle brand designed for local needs. The Olinia 1 targets urban commuters with a low price of 150,000 pesos and modest range, utilizing affordable LFP battery technology. This initiative aims to shift domestic manufacturing away from reliance on Chinese imports while fostering local expertise in battery and vehicle integration under Plan México.
In Mexico, most of the industry is international companies, and most of the decisions are being made outside the country.
- Animats
This is much like the Tata Nano, the one-lakh car.[1] Although very cheap, it did not sell.
- hn_submit
How much is this car merely a rabble of Chinese parts made to look like an indigenous Mexican car? I see this as a Chinese ploy to work around the American import tariffs by praying on Mexican national pride for a so-called "national car industry."
If this ploy works you'll see larger versions of this car hitting the roads which look suspiciously like Chinese BYD and SAIC EVs. All these will of course be exported North of the Border, courtesy of NAFTA.
I hope the government stops this attempt dead in its tracks before it starts to hurt our car industry.
- porphyra
The article talks a lot about how China makes most of the electric cars and Mexico wants to "capture a piece of the action", but the Olinia has substantial amounts of its engineering and parts from China [1]. And instead of learning from a nice actual roadgoing car, they based it on a golf cart-like mini vehicle from a little-known Chinese motorcycle manufacturer.
[1] https://elceo.com/investigaciones-especiales/olinia-el-vincu...
- blovescoffee
This is going to go absolutely nowhere. There's really no market for these and the govt. would rather focus on something flashy like a new car instead of infrastructure or anything that could threaten Pemex (god forbid...)
- alephnerd
Based on Olina's marketing [0], they are primarily targeting to replace auto rickshaws/three-wheelers.
It isn't meant to be a direct competitor of a Nissan Versa, Chevrolet Aveo, Nissan Frontier, or a Kia K3.
A better approach would have been adopting Malaysia's strategy of working on building a domestic battery platform [1], as the actual value add of an EV platform comes from the battery itself.
Also, the Olina Uno is very feature light (no AC, no air bags, little to no trunk space) despite costing around $8600 [2] despite Chinese, Indian [3], and Vietnamese [4] EV cars providing those features out of the box at the $7,000-9,000 pricepoint.
[0] - https://www.olinia.auto/
[1] - https://asia.nikkei.com/business/automobiles/electric-vehicl...
[2] - https://insideevs.com/news/798256/mexico-olinia-uno-ev-cheap...
[3] - https://asia.nikkei.com/business/automobiles/electric-vehicl...
[4] - https://asia.nikkei.com/business/automobiles/electric-vehicl...