If you haven’t already had the pleasure of discovering it, I write a fun column called the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week. Each week I go spelunking into the caverns of the Alibaba electric vehicle catalog and find something awesome, weird, and usually surprisingly low-cost to share with the world. I’ve wanted to purchase a lot of these myself, and I even did pull the trigger on an electric pickup truck recently. But it turns out that I’m not the only one who has been bitten by the weird Alibaba EV bug – as an Electrek reader shared with us his experience purchasing the $1,700 electric mini-Jeep I found earlier this year.

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Remember when the coolest kids on the block had those ride-on PowerWheels Jeeps? Well, just because we’re adults now doesn’t mean we can’t still have the same type of fun. This week’s entry for the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week is a fun-looking little electric Jeep with room for two adventure-loving adults.

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Jeep has been promising up to four new electric vehicles for more than two years. So it would be easy to dismiss Christian Meunier, Jeep’s chief, when he makes new claims about his outfit as “the world’s most sustainable SUV company.” But his interview today on Autocar reveals a new type of EV message: raw performance. That should excite both 4×4 buyers and EV fans.

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Carlos Tavares, chief executive of Groupe PSA (formerly PSA Peugeot Citroën), was already ambivalent about EVs. A few weeks ago, he said, “We are selling our electric vehicles to green addicts.” Fiat Chrysler has also been reluctant to invest in electric vehicles. But the planned merger between the two would have allowed them to share EV-development costs ­— and finally deliver electric cars on a large global scale.

But it now appears that negotiations to finalize the merger are being threatened by the coronavirus.

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Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) announced that it is investing $4.5 billion in five of its existing Michigan factories and part of that investment is going to enable plug-in electric Jeep production and possibly all-electric vehicle production in the future. expand full story