It Broke Down TWICE In 48 Hours - The Cheapest New Car You Can Buy is TERRIBLE!

Hey guys, the last time you left us we were in exactly the same position. We had just spent over $5,000 on this brand new Candy electric car, the cheapest car, well cheapest new car in America, and trying to drive it home we figured out that it was just too slow with a top speed of 35 miles an hour, that is until it completely died and left us stranded. So now, whoa sorry, now we're towing it back to the office and Tommy's idea is that we may have a bad battery management system that thinks that this car has 57% battery when it has no battery. We've got all kinds of trouble lights on, we've got the battery light on, we've got the engine, well basically the equivalent of a check engine light right there for an EV, and so you know the plan is to plug it in on the level two charger at the office and see if that fixes it, because unfortunately there are no candy dealers as far as I know that you can take this to and fix it, and unfortunately also because of the way we bought it at the auction we may not be able to return it, even though at this point we might have the world's most expensive electric paperweight. But the good news is, well there's no good news, is there good news Tommy? Yeah my plan is to take it to the ranch and just get a whole bunch of different guns and shoot it, see how long it takes for it to start on fire and burn down to the ground. I like that plan. I don't know about that, anyway let's roll a little bit of video of how we bought this so you guys can see kind of how we got ourselves into this predicament. This? Yes. This is what you bought? I bought this, I bought the candy K27. Why is it, what does a 27 mean? I don't know Tommy, I don't know if I bought you know an expensive go-kart or the coolest cheapest electric new car in the world. It's got airbags? Yeah it does. It's a safe vehicle. You know if this thing did 60 and as long as you signed the waiver saying I wouldn't care if I died in an accident with a beat, this would be a really popular car. You think 35 is fast when you're on a bicycle? It does sound quick fast but when you're on a 45 on our road I don't even know how many people are behind us, it's got to be millions. We got some kind of warning light here. Oh gee. Not good news there Dan. No. Oh no it's it's dead. Is it? Yep. You lost power? It's not moving. Okay pull over here. Nothing? Nothing. It's blinking, it's broken down. Brand new strap, brand new car. It's a good day huh? Not a good day, it's a bad, it's one of the worst days of the week. I'd say it's one of the worst days of the year. We just took five thousand dollars and went boom boom boom boom right in the fireplace. Actually after auction fees more like five thousand six hundred dollars. On the plus side though. Yeah? Here's the plus side. What's that? We got a temporary tag so we can drive it around on the road. You think we're helping Candy or hurting them with their uh expansion plans in America? Hey Candy if we get this running uh help us jailbreak it and we'll uh we'll prove to you that you actually built a car that is sellable and drivable. Okay. Karina push it out in case it starts on fire. Here we go. We're plugged in. 15.8. Does it say 15.8 on the car? This is eight. All right so our charger tells us how many kilowatt hours we've put in the car and if the battery management system is messed up in other words if it doesn't know exactly how much power is in the battery which is possible then if this goes all the way up to 17 right now we're at 0.26 then we know that's the issue. So basically even the car said we had 50 battery we were at zero uh and we'll know that because this will go all the way up to 17 kilowatt hours. All right well let's load a charge and then get some lunch since we haven't had lunch and then we'll come back and we'll see you know we'll see if it's running again. Cool. Okay cool. So we just got back from lunch. The car soaked up 2.3 kilowatt hours of electricity. Tom's putting the uh Tommy's putting the safety vest on. You can never be too safe in the Candy K27. It's like a motorcycle but worse every way. Does it fit you? No. The good news is it hasn't caught on fire yet. The only car where you got to keep the tow hook handy at all times. That's what that cubby's for actually. It's pretty convenient. It reads 71 percent. That's not right. So I think the computer is just completely wrong. Those two kilowatt hours should not be 20 percent unless the battery's but even then I still would be pretty surprised. Good luck. Call me if you get stuck. Your turn. Parking brake. Okay. You bring me back a couple golf balls maybe some teas and you know. You made a golf cart joke. Very clever. All right let's see if the Candy is fixed out on its second voyage. Hold on Cole. Oh look at that. The performance has returned. The handling is as lopsided as ever. I think we figured out the issue. It's just out of battery. Now the question is is the computer completely wrong or is the battery shot? You know one of the two things but we're gonna pull it in put it back on the charger get some juice in the Candy. Get the power. Look at the power. Back up and running. The mighty Candy back in business. Leave it unplugged. I say we leave it unplugged. Probably a good idea. Yeah. Okay. All right we'll plug it in tomorrow morning. Should we leave it outside? Hey Tommy here's another piece of safety equipment we should probably uh. That would do nothing. What do you mean? Let that lithium battery make their own oxygen. Do we know it's a lithium battery? No. Look at this. Look at the keyless entry. I love this thing. What a machine. So we charged the Candy up overnight and the good news is that number 14.28. That means that the car took 14.28 kilowatt hours of energy plus another two and a half which we put into it yesterday. So hopefully really what's going on with this car is that the battery management system the BMS doesn't know when the battery is full or when it's empty. So when it left us stranded on the road basically the battery was completely dead but the car didn't know the battery was completely dead. So we thought there was a problem with the car when in fact it was just a problem with the car not knowing the state of the battery. Still have that light. I don't know what that one means. Oh just went out. Whatever it means. It just fixed itself. I love cars that fix themselves. You know this Candy may not be such a pile of um you know what uh and we may not be taking to the ranch to see how it does with uh you know high speed weaponry. Hey Alex I know how much you love uh small cars. You do have that Suzuki. Yeah I love slow small cars. So Alex owns a Japanese K car. What's it called? The Suzuki. Suzuki Every. Yeah so it's a little tiny van. Maybe you can actually show them at the end of this video. So I thought uh you could be the first TFL staffer outside of me and Tommy to drive the uh K27. Love to get your impressions. This uh as of now has 27.7 miles on it and this is like the dirtiest new car I've ever been in. It just the outside has this like layer of black film on it. The dashboard looks like it's sun faded and yeah just not impressed with uh this brand new car so far but take it out on the road. See what this is like. Pull out on the main road and mat it. That's full throttle and then yeah you get up to 35 and you can feel it just fall off a wall there because this has a governor and we're gonna try and get rid of that governor. I'm determined to get rid of the speed limiter on this. That's funny. Not exciting at all but I gotta say I'm actually a little bit impressed. I didn't think anything was going to impress me with this car but I gotta say there's a bigger difference between the standard drive mode and sport mode in this than most new cars I drive so there's one good thing but still I'm pulling back into the office because I don't want anyone I know to see me in this. You want to park it next to your little Suzuki? Don't touch my car like that. You're gonna scratch it. You like this thing? No. The good news is that the Candy K27 makes your van look big. It does yeah look at that. Look at that yeah it makes it look actually like you know like it's a real van as opposed to a toy van. Brendan's smart car does that too so we just got to keep buying small vehicles and then I'll feel normal. All right well you know our next uh goal out there is to get this thing actually uh jailbroken right because it's just too slow. It's way too slow. It's way too slow yeah. Big guy in a little car. Windows work. Wait power windows? Yeah. Of course. This is candy. Oh candy. You know when you name something candy it's it's good. Yes. Wait is this a bench seat? I'm in drive. What is happening? So Nathan and Andre we're going to take the candy for a ride but it's not actually moving. It's got a little warning light. It's not going into any gear. It just flashes warning so it's broken down again and this time we don't have a fix so we're going to put it out in the sun. I think the issue is my dad took it to a car wash and it got wet so we're going to try to put it in some rice let it let it dry out and then we'll try it again. I'll put it on the rice. You got any rice Andre? No. Ready? Yeah. It's ever been Andre. This is as fast as it gets. We'll put it by the trash can or maybe we'll just put it in the trash can. There you go. Should I park it behind the Toyota? Sure. The problem is then we wouldn't be able to push it again. I guess we could just push it down because that one won't move. I'm just going to stop right here. If we're lucky it'll roll into traffic and get hit by a truck and then maybe we can convince UPS to hit it. That would be good. That would fix our problem. Take it off the road. This has to be a new vehicle you could possibly get. You've done it. You finally found a vehicle less reliable than a Land Rover. It's got 20, yeah funny, my Land Rover works great. This thing's got 25 miles on it. It's broken down twice now. While we're waiting for the candy to dry out let's take a look at this company because it's a really interesting story and just from a brief amount of research I've discovered some very fascinating things about Candy. Now in 2020 there was a plethora of articles that came out about the K-27. This is one from Green Car Reports. Candy claims $7,999 effective cost in California for 59 mile electric car. K-27 cleared for road use. Here's one from CNN where discussed the Candy. Another one from Electrek. So this company got a ton of publicity. There's even a drive here on Inside EVs where they drove the Candy. And all of these reviews are basically November of 2020. All of these news articles. And since then I've heard pretty much nothing about Candy from any news articles. So that got me thinking like what happened to this little company? Well it turns out Candy is a publicly traded company and then at the end of November 2020 Hindenburg Research which is this large research firm went ahead and published their findings on what they discovered when they investigated Candy. Candy how this China-based Nasdaq listed company used fake sales EV hype to nab 160 million from U.S. investors and this was published at the end of November of 2020. And let's see some of their findings. Today we reveal what we believe to be a brazen scheme by China-based Nasdaq listed Candy Technologies Group to falsify revenue using fake sales to undisclosed affiliates. Let me refresh this page here. So there's a lot of really interesting findings here. Candy raised $160 million from U.S. investors this month alone. All told we think Candy has engaged in major fake revenue scheme hyping its story to U.S. investors in order to take advantage of regulatory gaps. But this is a really large article. I definitely recommend you read it and I'm not claiming that this is what Candy did. This was based on the Hindenburg Research company but check this out. The company's largest customer representing about 55 percent of the last 12 months sales shares a phone number with a Candy subsidiary and shared an executive with Candy. They quote visited this customer. It is based in a tiny building right next to Candy's factory with a sign indicating that it's a Candy company. The same building housed another entity used by Candy as part of a separate fake sales scheme to collect illegitimate subsidies from the Chinese government for which it was fined and sanctioned. So pretty bold claims here and pretty pretty explosive research that Hindenburg found and really lots and lots of research. But a couple interesting things I want to point out which I think is very fascinating. So this is 2016 the Chinese government announced that Candy had been involved in a scheme through its joint venture to obtain illegitimate EV subsidies through the use of sham sales to related parties. Now check this out. In 2019 media stumbled across a car lot where thousands of Candy cars were apparently sitting unused and had been deteriorating for years believed to be part of the scheme. Wow. So basically this scheme at least Hindenburg claims this scheme works because Candy cars were so cheap the cost to build the vehicles was less than the subsidies. So Candy just needed to build as many cheap cars as possible to cash in on the government money. Very interesting. Now what else is interesting is that well prior to 2020 Candy has had a rather checkered past with sales here in the U.S. and this just keeps going and going. Here we go. This is in part three. Candy has been quote launching in the U.S. for 12 years. We expect its efforts will continue to sputter. So Candy quote launched in the U.S. in 2008. Its first batch of cars were seized by U.S. customs after being imported illegally. The launch failed. The company eventually sorted out the problem and in 2008 a smattering of U.S. dealerships attempted to sell the car. There it was back in 2008. Now this is where things get very interesting. We asked Candy's 2008 U.S. distribution partner about the vehicles. They quote didn't run. Every single one broke. Here's the founding partner of Candy's U.S. importer. We brought in our first 200 vehicles and had nothing but problems. They didn't run. Every single one broke. The prototype was excellent but when they started shipping these vehicles were nothing but problems. Okay kind of alarming here. Every single one. I'm a salesman and I was running around the country like a mechanic. I was flying all around to fix these things and just got the point. I can't do this anymore. I left because the whole process was horrible. Too secretive. A lot of side deals I don't know about. I said you guys handle it. I'm out. Oh boy. Not great. So a very checkered past here in the U.S. and this just goes on and on and on. And definitely worth a read on this Hindenburg research about Candy. But I'm kind of worried about parking it inside now. I'm kind of curious if maybe letting it sit in the sun has caused it to start up again. But very interesting. Candy has definitely a checkered past. Okay uh where's Nathan? Uh he screamed out and left. He just he gave up on it. He's abandoned the Candy. Yes. So I really do think that my dad got this car wet and we just had to let it dry out in the sun. So it's been some time. Fingers crossed we can get it to move. Okay ready? Pushing the button. Okay. Andre. What? It says ready. No I don't believe it. Andre. So it just needs to dry out. I think no hang on you're driving this thing. I don't want to drive this again. Oh yeah. I would love to drive it. Okay here I'll switch with you. You can slide over on the bench. Oh yes. This is a wonderful bench seat and it's a floor mat by WeatherTech. I didn't know WeatherTech made floor mats for this. You know what's funny? I don't know what car these WeatherTechs came out of. I think they came out of a Porsche and they fit perfectly. So this is basically a 911. Maybe a 910. It's missing some numbers. So I noticed we have front disc brakes. Oh yeah. Rear drums. Yep. What kind of suspension do we have? Like Bilstein or something? It has suspension. I don't know what kind. I think we're good to go. Oh my gosh it's blowing air. It's kind of cold. First drive in the Candy Andre. It's moving and it's stopping. I think we're good. All right hold on. Are you starting out in drive or are you going into sport mode? Oh is there a sport mode? Yeah put it into sport. You'll see a huge difference. It says 107 miles remaining. That's completely lie. There's nowhere near that. Maybe 40. Let me let me do a J-turn. Oh did you hear that? You squealed the front tires. Wait I'm a little scared. This thing is a handling machine Andre. Oh I think I'm toughed out. I think you hit the limit of 35. I just lost 20 miles of range. But we went like half a mile. We went 0.3 of a mile. So as long as you don't trust either the range estimate or the battery estimate or maybe even the speed speedometer it's okay. Right. At this point you're probably wondering well how well equipped is the Candy K27 and that's where we need a real expert Doug DeMuro except he's not around so I'm going to do my best impersonation and hopefully tell you all the quirks and features you need to know. This is the Candy K27. The most affordable new car in the USA and in this video I'm going over all the quirks and features of the K27. Then we're going to get it out on the road and maybe throw it in a trash can. The design of the K27 is as if someone described a Mini Cooper over the phone and that's what they went with. The key is clearly a knock off Audi key from about 10 years ago but it does have one really cool quirk and feature. You've got lock unlock and this sensor button which allows you to honk the horn three times so you can find the Candy in a parking lot. The quality of the Candy is a little bit suspect and the doors are about two inches thick but at least you have push button lock. On the inside you have leather vinyl seating surfaces with contrasting red stitching and the front is a bench seat that slides forward back reclines and can even be lifted up for shorter drivers although if you need to lift this seat up you're probably so short you probably shouldn't be driving whatsoever. The Candy has two airbags one for the driver and one for the passenger but judging on this airbag panel fitment I'd be more scared about that airbag exploding than the actual crash itself. The Candy does come equipped with push button start and it does have a conventional shifter reverse neutral drive and sport. You're probably wondering where is the parking mode there is no parking cog instead you have to engage the parking brake which if you're wondering barely holds the car. Hello! Off center with the smiley face not fully on the panel USB port auxiliary port and climate control you have a three position fan with heat and AC you want to change the temperature well too bad you get heat or you get AC no temperature choices whatsoever. The Candy does have a touchscreen display with some of the worst glare I've seen on any car but it's surprisingly useful with radio and bluetooth connectivity and there's even a vehicle information page which shows you temperatures of the motor and the controller that kind of thing and of course the backup camera which is federally mandated and one fantastic feature of the backup camera if you have the radio up and you're jamming along if you put it in reverse it shuts off the radio so you can see better. The gauges in the Candy are surprisingly nice a tachometer and a speedometer. The tachometer in an electric car is kind of weird and yes it does show rpms allegedly the speedometer is actually also kind of weird because it goes red at 60 miles an hour which is supposed to be the top speed except this one is limited to 35 so you pay for the full speedometer but you certainly don't use it. The backseat of the Candy is genuinely incredible considering this was supposed to be a twelve thousand dollar car or under eight thousand after tax credit this is an amazing rear seat check out some of the quirks and features first of all you do have real headrests that rise from the base of the cushion you also have really incredible legroom i'm six feet tall plenty of space with map pockets and even a little hook here to hang some groceries the best part though is the headroom not bad for such a tiny car and the seats not only slide forward and backward they also recline like a Rolls Royce. The trunk of the Candy is quite small but it does have some interesting quirks and features starting with the charger and if you ever wonder what the origin of this car is the script on the charger may give you a hint it's your standard 110 volt wall outlet you also get a safety vest which we have used several times already and under here you're even going to find a little warning triangle and check it out the seats do fold flat. Well I hope you've enjoyed my Doug homage and guys I hope you are enjoying this Candy series because this car is genuinely horrible it's just terrible but let us know what you want to see done in the comment section below so long as the car stays running and as always this has been Tommy and the whole team we'll see you on another Candy episode see what else breaks it's going to be a lot. The Candy also has a backup beepers and let's see if they work so I'm backing up to a wall it's beeping huh I would say that they actually work extremely well look at that I'll be damned good work Candy.