Chevrolet Spark EV Electric Car For Korea As Well As U.S.Chevrolet Spark EV Electric Car For Korea As Well As U.S.

While it was announced a year ago, the Chevrolet Spark EV electric car still hasn’t formally been shown by General Motors.
That may change at a “GM Electrification” event to be held in the San Francisco Bay Area next month.
The only nugget of news we’ve heard lately is that the Spark EV will be sold in South Korea, where it is built, as well as in the States.
The news comes courtesy of GM Korea’s investment and development plan, released Thursdays and covered by the Wall Street Journal (via Autoblog Green).
Depending on South Koreans’ appetite for electric cars, it could be that the small country buys as many Spark EVs as are made available to U.S. buyers.
The Spark EV is widely accepted to be a so-called “compliance car,” offered for sale in only a handful of states to keep its maker in compliance with California zero-emission vehicle rules.
That means that GM is likely to sell only as many Spark EVs as are required to meet the regulatory numbers–just as Honda is doing with its Fit EV and Toyota with its RAV4 EV.
Thus far, all we know about the Spark EV is that it will have a 85-kilowatt (114-horsepower) electric motor, built in White Marsh, Maryland, driving the front wheels.
That’s more power than the conventional gasoline 2013 Chevrolet Spark offers from its 1.2-liter four-cylinder engine: 83 hp.
Chevrolet staged a press call last March that boiled down to the statement that it was testing the Spark EV in California. The company declined to say anything substantial about the progress of the tests, however.
The Spark five-door minicar is the smallest Chevrolet sold in the U.S. market in two decades.
While Chevrolet says its sales have exceeded expectations, the minicar segment is still small in the U.S. compared to subcompacts and compacts.
It was a compact car, in fact, that Chevy used to test its first battery-electric vehicle in Korea, two years ago.
2013 Chevrolet Spark EV cutaway
That car, a Chevrolet Cruze EV, had a range of up to 100 miles, but GM has said nothing since then about putting it into production.
So for now, Chevy’s first battery-electric vehicle since the late lamented GM EV1 is also its smallest vehicle, period.
Is that a good thing or not?
Leave us your thoughts in the Comments below.
+++++++++++
Follow GreenCarReports on Facebook and Twitter.

View original article at : “https://www.greencarreports.com//news/1080118_chevrolet-spark-ev-electric-car-for-korea-as-well-as-u-s”