The first time we ever saw THAT very CitiGo: We bought it on July 22nd, and picked it up 24 hours later:
December of 2012, not long after I moved to Hong Kong, I placed a deposit on a Tesla Model S. It was only 21 months later that I could take delivery, while the right hand drive cars used in Hong Kong meant that I had to wait for Tesla to make this variant available. I had the car from September 2014 to 2019, a few weeks shy of being 5 years. We didn’t drive the car more than just over 40,000 km. As we were planning to move to Switzerland, we didn’t need the car any more. There were at least 5 solid reasons for not bringing the car with us to Switzerland. But we absolutely loved the Tesla: A little part of me wished we could have kept this particular car for life. I know that I will regret some day, that I let go of it - only a few hundred Model S in right hand drive have been built, until the auto pilot came along.
For about a year, we didn’t have any car at all. Public transport in Switzerland works very well, even when living in that village we chose to reside in. At some stage, we decided we wanted a small city car, mainly to enable my wife to take care of both our kids as well as her own requirements to make her daily routine possible, also when I wasn’t at home for a while. We had been spoiled by the Tesla, but weren’t looking for a car of the same size or cost. Even the Model 3 was larger and more expensive than we needed: We just wanted a small city car.
I hadn’t had a fossil fuelled car since up to 2012, and I really didn’t want to revert back to fossils. If I really had to, I would have found a cheap, old car that would just barely cover our needs. The Tesla Model 3 was just so much overkill, for our simple needs.
I started looking at other electric cars. Leasing, renting, car pool and many other options. I looked for 2nd hand EVs, but wasn’t really happy with what I could find. Considering the extensive amount of newly developed EVs, just around the corner for 2021 and onwards, I didn’t want to pay too much for something that would shortly be even further lacking in both price and performane. In that sense, the EV market resembles the gadget market quite a lot: There is always a better and cheaper model arriving in the near future. But such is life, compromises must be tolerated. Then I came upon the VW triplets, the VW e-UP, Seat Mii and Skoda CitiGo e iV. The VW and Seat were really hard to source, but there were several CitiGos for sale. Parallel import, typically from Germany, Poland or Czechia. The blue Czech CitiGo we ended up choosing, had just arrived a few days earlier. 5 years factory warranty across Europe, 100,000 km, while the battery pack had 8 years and 160,000 km warranty.
We bought the CitiGo on July 22nd, and picked it up 24 hours later. I since found out that in other places, people were on a waiting list for some times a year, especially for the e-UP. We paid just under 21,000 CHF (about the same in USD at the time), for the Style version, with the Comfort package. As for warranty and equipment, we couldn’t get any better options. Read other blog posts about the CitiGo for more information ...
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