Nissan has had a $25k target pricetag on its forthcoming Leaf EV for some time now, as it’s built hype towards the car’s commercial rollout later this year. That price will be crucial in taking on GM’s Volt EREV, which is said to retail somewhere in the $40k ballpark but offers a range-extending gas engine. Allcarselectric.com got a little more detail out of Nissan execs, and reported back in November that

According to Brian Carolin, Nissan’s marketing executive for North America, the cost of the upcoming Leaf will be equivalent to the monthly cost of a fully loaded Honda Civic, plus the cost of its monthly fuel bill.  To simplify pricing Carolin broke it down as such, “That means the purchase price (about $28,000) or comparable monthly payment for a high-end Civic plus the cost of the gasoline it would need to cover 1,200 miles (at 30 MPG and $3/gallon, about $120.”

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Picture above are the base-model prices for the cheapest sedan and hatchback variants of the new Ford Fiesta. As you can see, the cheapest Fiesta hatch is priced $1,800 more than the cheapest sedan. In part, that’s because Ford won’t offer an S trim Fiesta hatchback, but even in the best apples-to-apples comparison, the SE trim hatch costs $800 more than an SE sedan. Compare that to last month’s subcompact segment sales leader, the Nissan Versa. Like Ford, Nissan makes its lowest-cost models sedan-only; in fact you can’t buy a Versa hatch with the base 1.6-liter engine. By that measure, the $9,990 “base” 1.6 sedan is a whole lot cheaper than the lowest-cost Versa hatch, the $13,150 1.8 S. But compared apples-to-apples to a 1.8 S sedan, the cheapest Versa hatch carries a mere $50 premium over the sedan. As a hatchback lover, I want to damn Ford for not offering a hatchback Fiesta for less than $15k. On the other hand, with so few hatchback options on the market, I can understand why Ford would want to squeeze more cash out of weirdos like me who crave hatches possibly because nobody else does. But has Ford taken the hatchback premium too far?