The Electrek review: This tiny Citroën Ami microcar is just weird enough to work
I don’t think it’s fair to call the Citroën Ami a “weird car.” Not because it isn’t weird, but rather because it isn’t a car. It’s technically considered to be a quadricycle, a type of vehicle classification in Europe that falls somewhere between a motorcycle and a standard car. That helps it thread the needle of low cost and low regulations while still offering much the feeling of an actual car. It may not have a dozen airbags like some cars (or even one airbag), but you weren’t planning on hitting anything anyway, right?
To test out one of these funny little microcars, last month I went to the Greek Isles and rented one. After my wife and I relied on it as our main form of transportation for a week, I got pretty good sense of what the Ami can and can’t do, and who it might be best suited for.
Now let’s get the major questions out of the way right up front. You want to know how far, how fast, and how much, right?
Basically, this tiny car can go 75 km (47 miles) on a charge, is software limited to 28 mph (45 km/h), and costs somewhere around €7,400 depending on the country, which is around US $8,000.
If you’re still with me, awesome. You’re about to see a really cool little vehicle. If you stopped reading after the specs, well, then how are you still here? Ha, I caught you! Stick around, this thing is really cool. Trust me. In fact, you can check out the video below to see my testing experience and thoughts on this odd little vehicle.
So obviously the Citroën Ami is not a powerhouse of a car. But it’s not meant to be.
Instead, it’s designed for purely city and local driving needs. It’s for the kind of person that likes the idea of a Vespa, but wants to be able to carry a bunch of groceries, bring a friend along, or just doesn’t want to get rained on.
I’m very much a bicycle/scooter/motorcycle kind of guy, and you’ll rarely find me reviewing four-wheeled vehicles. But microcars are that fun little overlap where we can say, “Sure, sometimes you want a box around you, but you don’t want to take up more space than you need, either.”
That’s kind of the beauty of the Citroën Ami. Weaving through the tiny Greek roads was easy. Parking into spots that weren’t really parking spots but are too small for a “real” car, well, that’s easy too. Or at least it is after a couple days. In the beginning I kept thinking I was closer to bumping parking signs and other cars than I really was. I’d get out and look, sure that I was kissing it, when I really had another 50 cm (nearly 2 feet) left. You don’t realize how close you are to the front and back of the car, but you can just about reach out and touch both.
That’s really the winning feature of the Ami, is that it is small. It’s easy to drive since there isn’t more vehicle than you need. It’s easy to park. It’s easy to squeeze past other cars, at least to an extent.
The downsides though are similar to many “real” cars, in that you’re still getting stuck in traffic when the shoulder isn’t wide enough to squeeze past, and you’re still left searching for parking instead of being like a bike and motorcycle where you can basically park anywhere. Both of those were occasionally frustrating, especially for someone that is used to seeing any area the size of my body and parking my two-wheeler there.
Is the Citroën Ami powerful enough?
It doesn’t look like a very big car, and at 458 kg (1,009 pounds), it isn’t very heavy either. But that means the little 6 kW (8 hp) electric motor doesn’t have to work too hard either.
The little guy is actually decently torquey, and I could occasionally spin the tires on dusty roads when pulling out of an intersection.
I even took it on the winding mountain road up to Ancient Thera, a daunting climb with 22 switchbacks and a distinct lack of guardrails. My wife didn’t join me on that little excursion since she didn’t think the Ami would actually make it. I didn’t fight her too hard – if I didn’t survive then someone would have to go home and feed the dog.
Lo and behold, that little buggy wound it’s way up that mountain road like it was born for it! The cobblestone road was pretty bumpy, and at one point I think I started driving up a pedestrian path and then had to back down at a crazy angle while trying not to lose traction and slide off the side of the mountain, but despite those few hairy moments it was largely a success. So the Ami might not be fast, but it sure can climb mountains.
And now that I mention it, the little car can be faster than you’d think. I actually got it up to 73 km/h (45 mph) at one point – that story is coming up further down in this article.
Not a lot of creature comforts
As much fun as the Citroën Ami is to drive, as if it’s a little go-kart on the road, it’s not exactly the most fully featured. In fact, I’d wager that it shares its seats and accessory list with a go-kart too.
There’s minimal padding on the seats, though the driver side is decently adjustable forward and backward. There’s no radio, speakers, or air conditioning, but you do get a fan and a USB-A charging port.
There’s also not much storage, at least not in the conventional sense. There’s no trunk, but there is space behind the driver’s seat for a (very) small backpack. The amount of storage space there is inversely proportional to the length of the driver’s legs, as in it grows when the driver’s seat slides forward. Most of the storage is at the feet of the passenger, since their seat is offset further toward the rear of the vehicle. There’s a cutout there for trolley-style luggage, which we used and can confirm fits one typical carry-on bag. Then there’s the whole open area at the passenger’s feet where we’d toss a couple backpacks. There’s also a weirdly large amount of storage space above the dashboard in a set of three cutouts, and we’d often store water bottles or my wife’s purse up there.
The suspension is adequate but not the stuff of your dreams, though it handled some off-roading when the GPS inexplicably directed us onto a donkey road – see below. It’s definitely not the most comfortable suspension though, and otherwise the car feels quite basic. And that makes sense, since it was designed to be super-cheap to produce. That’s also why the front and rear are nearly identical except for the LED light colors. They share the same mold to cut down on cast. The doors are identical as well, which explains why the driver’s side has a suicide door. It’s the same thing as the passenger door and so they only have to have one set of door molds.
Other notes to frugality include the lack of conventional door handles. To open the door, you simply push the lock from the outside (no power locks) or pull a ribbon from the inside.
Charging the Citroën Ami can be an issue
The Citroën Ami was a lot of fun for us to use, despite its simple design and modest power. But the major issue for us was simply charging. I had checked in advance to ensure the island had several electric car charging stations, and it did. But when I arrived and picked up the Ami, I realized that didn’t matter since the car could only charge from a wall outlet, not from Level 2 public chargers.
There’s literally an electrical cable coming out of a hole in the door frame on the passenger side that lets the car plug in just like a toaster or electric kettle. It’s pretty funny the first time you see it.
The upside is that the small 5.5 kWh battery charges in 3 hours from empty or closer to 1.5 hours during typical charging stops with around half of the battery left. The problem for us was that we were staying at a hotel that didn’t have a garage with an outlet we could use to charge. It didn’t even have a garage, but rather a dirt parking lot outdoors.
That meant that we had to find our own charging solution on the go. Fortunately there is a single charging station on the entire island of Santorini with a wall outlet (and it also has a Level 2 charge outlet). It was installed by a lamp store who told me they put it in to attract more customers. If you’re ever visiting, go buy a lamp from them, they deserve it. We charged there several times, but also found charging at a Chinese restaurant, on a sidewalk, and by running an extension cord out of the hotel lobby a few times. Check it out in the video above.
If you own an Ami and have your own garage or other place to park that has an outlet available, you’ll never have to worry about it. I doubt you’ll ever go more than 75 km in a day. If we could have charged in a hotel garage, this wouldn’t have been an issue. But if you’re an apartment dweller or otherwise don’t have a charging location, this could be a hurdle. One solution would be to use an adapter for typical charging stations, though it’s not an ideal solution.
One note on charging: like many electric vehicles, the Citroën Ami doesn’t have regenerative braking when the battery is full. It’s a safety feature to prevent someone from overcharging the battery if going down a hill right after charging.
Which is what I did once, and accidentally discovered that the Ami can get up to at least 73 km/h (45 mph) on a downhill when regeneration is disabled. With nothing to prevent the motor from freewheeling, I was grinning ear to ear while racing down a long straight road for the coast, racking up an ever higher number on the tiny dashboard.
Normally the motor would enter regen after surpassing 45 km/h, even on a downhill. Until then, my highest score on a downhill had been 47 km/h. But if you ever have the chance of charging at the top of a big hill, you can try to beat my all-time best of 73 km/h!
In summary, I would totally buy one
Even as someone who much prefers to be on a two-wheeler, I would buy a Citroën Ami if it was available in my country. It’d be good for those times when I just need to use a car for something.
My 33 kg (72 lb.) dog doesn’t fit on my e-bike, my wife doesn’t always want to ride on my scooter, and sometimes it’s raining like crazy and I don’t feel like riding. A tiny, low-cost car-like vehicle such as this would solve those types of problems. And when I’m not using it, it doesn’t take up more space than it needs to.
But alas, Citroën hasn’t brought the Ami to my country, and so I’ll have to be content with this experience of renting one. Which by the way, I got mine from Pyrgo on Santorini, and I’d definitely recommend it if you ever visit the island. And I’m not just saying that so they hopefully won’t charge my credit card extra when they see the donkey road I took it on and that I didn’t register my wife as a second driver.
It was definitely fun as a vacation rental, but I wish I saw more of them on the roads everyday replacing oversized cars in cities.
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For years, Tesla has been the go-to EV recommendation for “normals” looking for a painless, low-effort experience from their first electric cars. In light of questionable recalls and its CEO’s recent involvement in controversial politics, however, people are starting to distance themselves from the trailblazing company.
All that begs the question: what should we recommend to EV noobs now?
Despite early quality issues and ongoing service headaches, the groundbreaking S3XY lineup of EVs have always had a secret weapon in the form of the Tesla Supercharger network.
That network of dependable high-speed chargers, paired with solid app integration that makes it easy for Tesla drivers to find available chargers just about anywhere in the US, gave the brand a leg up – but no more. By opening up the Supercharger network to brands like Ford, Hyundai, Kia, and others, Tesla has given away its biggest competitive advantage.
Add in charging and route-planning apps like Chargeway, that make navigating the transition from CCS to NACS easier than ever with its intuitive colors and numbers and easy on/off switch for vehicles equipped with NACS adapters, and it feels like the time is right to start suggesting alternatives to the old EV industry stalwarts. As such, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
Here, then, are my picks for the best Tesla S3XY (and Cybertruck) alternatives you can buy.
Less Model S, more Lucid Air
Developed by OG Tesla Model S engineers with tunes from Annie Get Your Gun playing continuously in their heads, the Lucid Air promises to be the car Tesla should and could have built, if only Elon had listened to the engineers.
With panel fit, material finish, and overall build quality that’s at least as good as anything else in the automotive space, the Lucid Air is a compelling alternative to the Model S at every price level – and I, for one, would take a “too f@#king fast” Lucid Air Sapphire over an “as seen on TV” Model S Plaid any day of the week. And, with Supercharger access reportedly coming later this quarter, Air buyers will have every advantage the Supercharger Network can provide.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Less Model 3, more Hyundai IONIQ 6
Hyundai has been absolutely killing it these days, with EVs driving record sales and new models earning rave reviews from the automotive press. Even in that company the IONIQ 6 stands out, with up to 338 miles of EPA-rated range and lickety-quick 350 kW charging available to make road tripping easy – especially now that the aerodynamically efficient IONIQ 6 has Supercharger access through a NACS adapter (the 2026 “facelift” models get a NACS port as standard).
The company’s sole electric sedan hasn’t seen the same sales success as IONIQ 5, of course – but that has more to do with America’s insatiable lust for crossovers and SUVs than any shortcoming inherent in the IONIQ 6 itself. All the same, Hyundai is helping dealers clear out its remaining 2024 and ’25 models with 0% financing for up to 48 months through June 2nd.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Less Model X, more Volvo EX90
Once upon a time, Mrs. Jo Borrás and I were shopping three-row SUVs and found ourselves genuinely drawn to the then-new Model X. Back then it was the only three-row EV on the market, but it wasn’t Elon’s antics or access to charging, or even the Model X’s premium pricing that squirreled the deal. It was the stupid doors.
We went with the similarly new Volvo XC90 T8 in denim blue, and followed up the big PHEV with a second, three years later, in Osmium Gray. When it’s time to replace this one, you can just about bet your house that the new 510 hp EX90 with 310 miles of all-electric range will be near the top of the shopping list.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Less Model Y, more Kia EV6
If half the fun of driving a Model Y is terrifying your passengers with its straight-line speed, then the Kia EV6 has to be a serious contender for a replacement.
The sporty EV6 GT made its global debut by drag racing some of the fastest ICE-powered cars of the day, including a Lamborghini, Mercedes-AMG GT, a Porsche, even a turbocharged Ferrari – and it beat the pants off ’em. Combine supercar-baiting speed with an accessible price tag, NACS accessibility, $10,000 in customer cash on remaining 2024 models ($3,000 on 2025s) and just a hint of Lancia Stratos in the styling, the EV6 is tough to beat.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Less Cybertruck, more therapy
It’s not bulletproof, it’s not easy to upfit, it shouldn’t be used for towing, and it won’t win in a straight fight against a vinyl picket fence. By just about every standard “truck” metric, the Tesla Cybertruck falls short against the competition from Chevrolet, Ford, and Rivian. On a more subjective front, the Cybertruck has become a symbol for a conservative movement that is (depending on your point of view) either making America great again or plunging a once-great democracy into an era of fascist oligarchy and widespread stupidity.
In short, it’s probably best to skip the CT.
If you disagree with that statement and feel like driving a new Tesla Cybertruck is the key to happiness, I’m not sure an equally ostentatious GMC Hummer EV or more subtle Rivian R1T will help you scratch that particular itch – but maybe therapy might!
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Original content from Electrek.
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Republicans launched multiple attacks against EVs, clean air and American jobs this week, at the behest of the oil industry that funds them. These attacks won’t be successful, and EVs will continue to grow regardless, and inevitably take over for outdated gasoline vehicles.
However, these republican attacks on EVs will still have some effect: they will diminish the US auto industry globally, leading to job losses and surrendering one of the jewels in the crown of American industry to China, where there is no similar effort to destroy its own domestic EV industry.
Republican attacks on clean air this week included moves to block funding that has led to a renaissance in US manufacturing and also to illegally block clean air laws. They also moved forward with a procedural step towards increasing US fuel costs by $23B, an effort which the former reality TV contestant posing as the head of the DOT announced in January.
These moves shouldn’t be a big surprise – republicans have opposed clean air and American jobs for many years now, and they’re doing it because they want to maintain the bribes they get from the oil industry.
But they should inspire worry for Americans, because they will only harm the country’s domestic manufacturing base in the face of a changing auto industry.
Republicans keep trying to kill clean cars
The last time a republican occupied the the White House, we saw similar efforts to try to raise fuel and health costs for Americans, and to block superior EV technology from flourishing. That didn’t work in the end, and EVs continued to grow both during that period and after.
All the while, fossil fuels have maintained their privileged policy position, being allowed to pollute with impunity and costing the US $760 billion per year in externalized costs. Much of that subsidy is accounted for in the cost of pollution from gas cars, which are one of the primary uses of fossil fuels, which means that, in fact, gasoline vehicles receive much more subsidy than EVs do.
And yet, EVs still managed to grow substantially, despite these headwinds. EV sales have continued to grow, both in the US and globally, even as headlines incorrectly say otherwise. The republican party’s attempts to kill them were futile, and will continue to be.
It didn’t work, but it did delay progress
However, anti-EV actions from Mr. Trump and the republican party did manage to delay progress from where it could have been if America actually instituted smart industrial policy earlier.
What if, instead of the bumbling, idiotic nonsense we went through the last time Mr. Trump squatted in the White House, we could have had something more like President Biden’s EV policy, which created hundreds of thousands of jobs and attracted hundreds of billions of dollars of manufacturing investment?
Surely the American auto industry would be ahead of where it is now if those investments had had time to come online. But instead, republicans are currently trying to kill those jobs, which has already led to several manufacturing projects being cancelled this year, depriving Americans of the economic boost they need right now.
Meanwhile, there’s one place that this sort of stumbling isn’t happening: China.
China is taking advantage
China has spent more than a decade focusing on securing material supply, building refining capacity, developing their own battery technology, and encouraging local EV manufacturing startups.
This has paid off recently, as Chinese EVs have been rapidly scaling in production in recent years. It took a lot of the auto industry by surprise how rapidly Chinese companies have scaled, and how rapidly Chinese consumers have adopted them, after having an initially slow start.
But that adoption hasn’t just been local, it’s also global. Last year, China became the largest auto exporter in the world, taking a crown that Japan had held for decades. But the change was even more dramatic than that – as recently as 2020, China was the sixth-largest auto exporter in the world, just behind the US in 5th place.
China’s dramatic turn upward started in 2020, and now it’s in first place. Meanwhile, because of all the faffing about, the US remains exactly where it was in 2020 – still in fifth place. Well, sixth now, since China eclipsed us (and everyone else).
Tariffs won’t fix it
The reaction of the rest of the world’s automaking countries has been to put tariffs on Chinese autos, hoping to forestall the country’s dramatic rise to dominance. (Although, due to Mr. Trump’s idiotic flailing, Europe is already talking about removing these trade barriers with China)
But tariffs have been tried before, and they didn’t work. When Japan had a similarly meteoric rise to global prominence as an auto manufacturer in the 1970s and 80s, largely due to their adoption of new technology, processes, and different car styles which incumbents were ignoring, the US tried to stop it with tariffs.
All this did was make US manufacturers complacent, and Japan still managed to seize and maintain the crown of top auto exporter (occasionally trading places with Germany) from then until now.
Then as now, the true way to compete is to adapt to the changing automotive industry and take EVs seriously, rather than giving the auto industry excuses to be complacent. But instead, republicans aren’t doing that, and in fact are working to ensure the American auto industry doesn’t adapt, by actively killing the incentives that were leading to a boom in domestic manufacturing investment.
US auto industry jeopardized by republicans
Make no mistake about it: destroying EV incentives, and allowing companies to pollute more and innovate less, will not help the US auto industry catch up with a fast moving competitor.
As we at Electrek have said for years, you cannot catch up to a competitor that is both ahead of you and moving faster than you.
This applies to individual companies, which took their sweet time responding to the challenge from electric upstarts like Tesla, and have now lost market share to said upstarts and let a competitor establish itself in a big way (even though Tesla’s CEO is now trying desperately to harm his own company specifically, and the US EV industry as a whole, by being the largest funder of the party working to destroy said industry).
It also applies to nations, which could have spent the last decade doing what the Chinese auto industry has been doing, but instead non-Chinese automakers have been begging their governments for more time, even though it’s not the regulations that threaten them, it’s competition from a new and motivated rival that is moving faster and in a more determined manner towards the future.
The way that we get around this should be clear: take EVs seriously.
But that’s not what republicans are doing, and in doing so, they are signing the death warrant for an important US industry in the long term.
Another thing republicans are trying to kill is the the rooftop solar credit, which means you could have only until the end of this year to install rooftop solar on your home before the cost of doing so goes up by an average of ~$10,000. So if you want to go solar, get started now, because these things take time and the system needs to be active before you file for the credit.
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International equipment manufacturer Vermeer has unveiled a full-scale prototype of its Interlune excavator, a machine designed to ingest 100 metric tons of rocks and dirt per hour, extracting valuable helium as it makes its way across the surface … of the Moon.
Helium plays a critical role in the manufacturing of semiconductors, chips, optics, and all the other stuff that makes EVs, autonomy, the Internet, and the rest of twenty-first century life possible. The problem is that, despite being the second-most common element in the universe, helium is pretty rare on Earth – and we are rapidly running out. As such, there are intense economic and political pressures to find new and reliable sources of helium somewhere, anywhere else, and that demand has sparked a new modern space race focused on harvesting helium on the Moon and getting it back home.
To that end, companies like American lunar mining startup Interlune and the Iowa-based equipment experts at Vermeer are partnering on the development of suite of interplanetary equipment assets capable of digging up lunar materials like rocks and sand from up to three meters below the surface, extract helium-3 (a light, stable isotope of helium believed to exist in abundance on the Moon), then package it, contain it, and ship it back to Earth.
“When you’re operating equipment on the Moon, reliability and performance standards are at a new level,” says Rob Meyerson, Interlune CEO. “Vermeer has a legacy of innovation and excellence that started more than 75 years ago, which makes them the ideal partner for Interlune.”
Enter: Japan
America isn’t the only spacefaring nation eyeing a helium mine on the Moon. Japan announced similar plans back in 2023, with Japanese construction giant Komatsu announcing plans to develop a fully electric excavator capable of operating on the lunar surface.
The company showed a scaled prototype of the machine at the 2025 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas (above), emphasizing the need to develop new ways to operate equipment assets in the extreme temperatures of extraplanetary environments beyond diesel or even hydrogen combustion.
On the airless surface of the moon, it would be impossible for an internal combustion engine to operate on the moon’s surface because there is no oxygen for combustion. Electrically powered machines seem the obvious solution with solar power generation supplying the electricity. But the answer is not that simple.
Temperature changes on the surface of the moon are extreme. They can soar to 110° C and plummet to -170° C. Developing electric construction machinery to perform in this environment is no easy task, but Komatsu is tackling issues one by one as they appear. Using thermal control and other electrification technologies, we are engineering solutions.
Despite Komatsu’s apparent head start, however, Vermeer seem to pulled ahead – not just in terms of machine development, but in terms of extraction potential as well.
“The high-rate excavation needed to harvest helium-3 from the Moon in large quantities has never been attempted before, let alone with high efficiency,” said Gary Lai, Interlune co-founder and CTO. “Vermeer’s response to such an ambitious assignment was to move fast. We’ve been very pleased with the results of the test program to date and look forward to the next phase of development.”
Interlune is funded by grants from the US Department of Energy and NASA TechFlights. In 2023, the company received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Innovation Research award to develop the technology to size and sort lunar regolith (read: dirt). Interlune has raised $18 million in funding so far, and is planning its first mission to the Moon before 2030.
Electrek’s Take
We’ve got space travel, weird mineral extraction from another planet that’s essential for our technology, and a rapid, unchecked proliferation of AI. All we need now is big worms, a whole bunch of hallucinogenic narcotics, and the will to smash up a bunch of data centers with baseball bats – then we’ll have a pretty decent Dune LARP going. Yee-ha!
SOURCE | IMAGES: Interlune.
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