What's the difference?
The small car segment is getting busy. Electric cars are reviving a part of the new car market we thought of as history.
The 2026 Geely EX2 hopes to come in and take the lead in that exact segment. In fact, it sold in enough numbers in China last year that it alone would make up close to half of Australia’s total annual new car sales.
A very aggressive price, plenty of features and cute styling are all weapons in its fight against the likes of the BYD Atto 1, GAC Aion UT or MG4.
It was, of course, inevitable that electric cargo vans would fall in price. Even allowing for the front-loading of running costs inherent in an EV, the fact that many cargo vans are company-owned and, therefore, purchased largely on price, meant somebody would hit the market with a cheapie that did the job.
In Australia, the cut-price last-mile vans include the Kia PV5 EV and Farizon V7E, both with price-tags under $56,000. The Farizon was the title-holder at sub-$50K drive-away, but a newcomer called the Cavan C1 rewrites that script with a starting price of under $45,000, drive-away, for the cheapest version.
A sub-brand of Chinese behemoth Foton, the Cavan brand will be distributed and retailed in Australia by a separate company to Inchcape (the local Foton distributor) and at the moment, there’s but a single dealership (in Melbourne’s south-east suburbs). That will surely change, however, as deliveries ramp up and the word gets out. In fact, as we go to press, a second dealership, also in Melbourne, has been announced.
The Geely EX2 is right-priced, feature-packed and feels very well suited to the city in terms of on-road behaviour. Its driving range in the base Complete will be a limiting factor to many, but the low price puts it in contention to be a solid second-car.
What it’ll likely come down to for many is style, which the EX2 feels on the front foot with, but the first impressions from the launch drive are positive, and it would be a surprise to see it flop even in the increasingly competitive and volatile small car segment.
The deliberately simplistic styling, sometimes weird cabin ergonomics and slavish devotion to pulling dollars from the end result make us wonder if the Cavan C1 doesn’t represent some kind of a revival of the white-versus-blue-collar occupational class system.
Socio-economic aspects aside, this would be okay if the C1 did everything as well as its peers. But it doesn’t. It does, however, get enough things right and enough things covered off adequately to be a viable tool for a business in the last-mile delivery industry or some other version of the courier game.
But it won’t be as easy to use as some offerings, nor will it be as comfortable over an eight-hour shift. And the way the driver-assistance features are calibrated means the Cavan will very possibly start to wear thin by about morning-tea time. This may bother its operators somewhat. But some fleet managers and CFOs? Not a bit. Which is where the return to that us-and-them thing comes into it.
A metaphor for the planet right now? Perhaps.