The story behind QueCargan: buying an electric car without enough context, and building a place where owners can share what ownership is really like.
A couple of years ago, I found myself in a situation that, looking back, feels almost funny: I was about to spend a considerable amount of money on something I had no idea how to evaluate.
I had decided to buy an electric car.
The problem was, the more I looked, the more questions I had.
The Maze of Unknown Brands
I remember exactly when I started searching. I opened my browser, ended up with fifteen tabs open, and started finding all these cars I had never seen before.
The Chinese cars, in particular, really caught my attention.
BYD, NIO, Xpeng, Zeekr, Seres, Ora, Wuling.
At the time, those names meant absolutely nothing to me.
There was no history. No context. No grandfather telling me, “My first car was an Xpeng, and it lasted fifteen years.”
Nobody was saying, “That car always has this problem, but it’s dirt cheap to fix.”
That collective memory we have with the brands we’ve known forever just didn’t exist yet, and that kind of knowledge helps a lot when you’re making a big decision.
I could read the specs.
I could see how many kilowatts the motor had, the battery size, the torque, the zero-to-sixty time, and the range the manufacturer claimed.
But none of that told me whether I was buying a good car.
It didn’t tell me what would happen if something broke, whether I would be able to find parts, or whether the person selling me the car would still answer the phone after handing me the keys.
Asking on social media didn’t solve much either.
We were all pretty much in the same boat. The people who already owned one hadn’t had them for very long, and there weren’t that many of us yet.
Trying to see what owners in China were saying wasn’t easy either.
There’s no Facebook over there, no Reddit, nowhere familiar for me to just peek in and see what regular people were saying.
And here comes the part I’m not particularly proud of.
In the end, I bought a car because I liked the way it looked.
It was made by one of the best-selling brands in China, it had a battery from one of the biggest battery manufacturers, and I went for it.
Almost completely blind.
Why Won't Anyone Just Tell Me the Price?
And don’t even get me started on trying to find prices.
I would go to dealership websites. Beautiful websites, plenty of photos, tons of information, but not a single price.
So I would ask on social media:
“How much is this car?”
“Send us a private message.”
I’d send them a private message.
“Please fill out this form.”
A form that practically asked for my blood type.
Then I had to wait for a salesperson to contact me.
And when they finally did:
“How much is the car?”
“What’s your budget?”
“How much do you currently spend on gas?”
“I’m just doing some research. Can you tell me the price?”
“But what do you need the car for?”
I just wanted to know how much the car cost.
And then, of course, came the follow-up calls.
That’s when I decided to import the car myself.
So, How Did It Turn Out?
Two years later, my car hasn’t needed any repairs.
It has more than 20,000 kilometers on it now, and the only issue I’ve had was with charging. Out of nowhere, it started charging at about half its normal speed.
Then it fixed itself.
I’ve taken it in for two routine maintenance visits, and the battery still retains 97% of its original capacity (SOH).
I’ve also saved quite a bit of money.
I went from spending around $200 a month on gas to spending between $35 and $40 on electricity.
And the instant torque...
But I’ll talk about that another time.
Now, just because things worked out well for me doesn’t mean everyone will have the same experience.
If I’m being fair, there was a good amount of luck involved.
And that’s exactly why nobody should have to rely on luck when making a decision like this.
The Conversation That Never Ends
Over time, I started seeing Facebook posts from people who were thinking about buying the same car I had.
They wanted to know how mine had turned out, what kind of range I was actually getting, how much I was spending, whether I’d had any problems, whether I would buy it again.
I always tried to help.
I wanted what I had learned to be useful to someone else.
I told them the good things, but I also told them what I didn’t like.
For example: no, the car doesn’t get anywhere near the range the spec sheet claims.
I also explained things I had only learned after buying it. That range isn’t always as important as you think it is at first. That having somewhere to charge completely changes the experience. That instant torque is one of those things that’s hard to explain until you’ve actually driven an EV.
But after answering the same questions over and over again, I started thinking:
There has to be a better way.
Because I could tell people about my experience.
But mine was only one experience.
There were plenty of other people driving different cars, buying from different dealerships, importing them in different ways, and having completely different experiences.
And all of that information was scattered everywhere.
A Facebook comment.
A WhatsApp conversation.
A post buried somewhere inside a group.
An answer somebody wrote six months ago that almost nobody was ever going to find again.
That’s when I had the idea of bringing all of that information and all of those experiences together in one place—a place where people could talk about these cars that charge.
QueCargan.
What QueCargan Really Is
If you visit the site, you’ll find prices.
You’ll find technical specifications.
You’ll be able to compare vehicles side by side and filter them by range, price, vehicle type, and other features.
And all of that matters.
In fact, one of the things I want QueCargan to do is exactly what I needed when I was shopping for a car: let me sit down, look at the options available, and understand how much they cost without having to talk to five salespeople first.
But if you ask me what the real heart of the project is, it’s not the specification tables.
It’s the owners.
The people who actually bought these cars and decided to tell others how things went.
Because a spec sheet can tell you that a vehicle has 400 kilometers of range.
An owner can tell you how far it actually goes.
A dealership can tell you it has excellent after-sales service.
An owner can tell you what happened when they actually needed to use the warranty.
A salesperson can explain every great feature during a test drive.
But someone who has spent one or two years living with the car can tell you about the things you only discover after driving it every day.
The good and the bad.
And I think both are equally important.
An owner saying their car has been great is valuable information.
Another owner saying they had a problem and the dealership handled it properly is valuable too.
And if somebody had a terrible experience, they should be able to talk about that as well.
QueCargan exists so those experiences don’t disappear inside a WhatsApp chat or get buried underneath hundreds of Facebook posts.
So that when someone is where I was—fifteen tabs open, looking at a bunch of brands they don’t recognize and trying to figure out who they can trust—they can see what happened to the people who bought before them.
We Don’t Have All the Answers, and That’s Okay
I don’t want to present QueCargan as if we’ve built the definitive encyclopedia of electric vehicles.
We haven’t.
We don’t know every vehicle.
We haven’t tested every model.
We don’t know how every car is going to hold up five or ten years from now.
And one person having a great experience doesn’t guarantee that the next person will have the same one.
But I do think something interesting happens when you start putting a lot of experiences together.
One review tells you one person’s story.
Ten reviews start to give you an idea.
Fifty might start showing you patterns.
And the more owners share what actually happened to them, the more useful QueCargan can become for the next person thinking about buying.
We’re not trying to be the experts who have every answer.
We want to bring the information together and let people’s experiences speak for themselves.
No filters.
An Invitation
If you own an electric vehicle—whether your experience has been amazing, complicated, or somewhere in between—I’d love for you to share it.
You don’t have to be a car expert.
You don’t have to know everything about batteries.
You don’t have to write the perfect review.
Just tell people how it’s been.
What you bought.
Why you chose it.
What you like.
What you don’t like.
How the dealership or seller has treated you.
What problems you’ve had.
Or simply what you wish you had known before buying it.
To you, that might feel like information you already take for granted because you’ve been driving the car for months.
To someone who is about to spend a significant amount of money, it might be exactly the answer they’ve been looking for.
QueCargan started with my experience, but the idea was never for it to stop there.
The more owners share theirs, the more useful it can become for everyone.
We don’t sell cars. We help you find the right one.
The conversation continues
What has living with your EV been like? Share the good, the difficult, or what you wish you had known before buying. Your experience can stay here for the next person with the same questions, instead of getting lost in a chat.
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