I think there's a large education gap surround EVs that needs to be filled. Hopefully more articles and experiments like this continue to appear. If you have an EV, consider spreading the word - good and bad. It's important to talk about all aspects to both bring more users into the EV fold, and address existing issues.
In this case I think the positive reactions a year later are more a result of having a good use case for the NEV/LSV rather than the truck being a good buy for the general public.
There's also arguably limited use cases like the article brings up (off road, not street legal, lots of land) - or at least "limited" in comparison with the average / mean vehicle that gets purchased by consumers.
Great that it has a use case and it's working for him, but I hesitate to universalize his experience as a result.
How many of the trucks you see in the US are actually needed, though? Most of them are only used for commuting, and twice the size of a truck used for actual work.
A truck used as a truck once per year and for commuting the rest of the year is cheaper than a truck and a small car. some of them could rent, but the restrictions on what you can do with a rental truck combined with the convince of a truck when you want it (rentals are sometimes sold out, and even if not you need to go get it while the truck is right there) mean a truck looks very compelling.
Yeah, renting a truck for, say, 2-3 days was something like $250-300 in my case. If I need one more than 2-3x a year it approaches the price point of a cheap truck vs a family sedan or SUV.
Actually I am. Rental trucks are not cheap if you use them for any period of time. If all you need is to get a sheet of plywood from Home Depot a couple times a year, then rent. Fuel is cheap, even at $5/gallon, compared to the costs of a rental, so it only takes a few times per year of renting before you are better off just paying for fuel in the truck.
That is before we account for rentals often being sold out. The fact that you don't have to plan ahead to use your own truck is worth something as well.
My old truck got 22 highway mpg, and the average family size sedan gets somewhere between 27-35 mpg (or up to 45 mpg if you count the Prius), coming out to roughly an extra $1,200 a year at $5/gal assuming 10k miles a year. Additionally, larger and taller vehicles are far easier to work on yourself.
In short, the operating costs are not all that much different. The true cost comes in with overall vehicle price and insurance costs, which heavily favor the family sedans.
It's not a matter of needing trucks, or this NEV/LSV, it's a matter of functionality and legality, and whether the purchase makes sense.
Functionally this electric truck has limited use case - low top speed, not street legal, low range, etc. - but there are a few niche cases where it's perfect for the job.
People could buy this small truck and try to make it street legal, but as mentioned by the article that would be prohibitively expensive, defeating the point of buying it because it's cheap. At that point you may as well look into a sedan EV because it's going to be comparable in cost (at least within 2x-3x of the price).
General use vehicles, both trucks and others, have a much broader area of operability. There are also EV trucks coming to market more quickly if that's what you want to spend your money on.
It fees like it’s competing with things like the John Deere Gator (~$15k) more than a regular on-road vehicle. Or even a regular golf cart, those things aren't cheap!
Exactly. This looks like a good alternative to importing a Kei car from Japan. With a bigger battery pack and some outlets, could be a be a perfect little runnabout truck for a small farm or ranch.
These comments are coming from the extrapolation of experience of imported personal electronics, as well as historical crash test results of CDM vehicles.
Yeah, I imagine if you're going to use a truck like this, it's for (relatively) slow hauling of stuff around a private property where there's low risk of hitting something. I wouldn't trust this in a collision with another vehicle even at low speed.
Honestly, I think $7,000 delivered for this is a pretty good price. It would make a nice farm vehicle, especially with that dump bed. It's in the same price range as a lower end UTV and looks like it would be far more comfortable doing, e.g., snow clearing duty. Swap in a set of BFG Mud Terrain tires and you're all set.
Some feedback on reliability, the rust issues, etc. would be nice but I'd seriously think about getting one. As for it not being street legal, well I live out in the country. Golf carts, UTV's, ATV's, minibikes, on the roads around here are not at all unusual. Not legal, but I only know of one case of someone getting ticketed.
I really want to agree -- I really want a truck like this in the USA, but unfortunately I need to disagree simply because it is not street legal.
I have an old 2001 beater truck I use for the purpose now, but I can't replace it with this EV because it's not street legal. I live in a rural area, but luckily I can drive 2 miles to a dump (transfer station) and 5 miles to a place with bulk mulch, soil, gravel, etc...
But I can't possibly get to either without going on state roads... And I can't drop my gas truck and replace it with an EV for $7k if it would not be legally usable.
I can't see many farms that could use this. For the same reason -- I certainly don't want to use my truck to get serval buckets of mulch, just to shovel it into the EV, then to shovel it out at the final destination.
If the gov lets me slap "farm use" tags on this, and that's all is needed... Okay, I'm interested.. but I think there's usually more requirements
I was not aware that golf buggies are so expensive, wow. I mean, doesn't surprise me that much considering that everything related to golfing seems insanely expensive, but I didn't expect golf buggies to cost more than a used car, new motorbike or other things.
Isn't the entire point to not be using any gas? You want to use a gas powered ICE truck to tow the EV to load contents into the EV's bed, then tow the EV back to where ever just to avoid transferring content from ICE->EV->application?
Jason Torchinsky from The Autopian imported a ChangLi a couple of years ago. He has posted regular updates since he got it (his old posts are still up at Jalopnik). I don't know how it compares to this one exactly, but there were a few posts showing some sketchy wiring, and some wires that nearly caught on fire. But it should give you some idea how it's been working.
It really isn't too bad if you have the right use case. You could get a Kei truck which makes a lot more power and you can register, but you'll be paying a good bit more ($9k for a 1990 with a dump bed near me) and you'll have the fun of maintaining a 30 year old JDM vehicle.
That's the actual car I think I want most in the world. It's so cheap and fun, and possibly even practical for me, but I don't think there's any way I could drive it in my city sadly.
Yeah, the "larger cars are safer for people inside the car but more likely to kill people outside the car" red queen race made roads even more terrible. In car like that, you would get ran over by a lifted truck or mama-SUV pretty quickly.
In the US you'd have to buy a bunch and put them through destructive crash tests to certify them, and I doubt these would pass - those smart cars actually have expensive high end steel structures built in that make them surprisingly resilient, and I doubt they do that in China.
If they had 3 wheels you could skip a lot of that and count it as a motorcycle. Also, anything older than 25 years basically just bypasses the rules which means a lot of 90's Kei cars from Japan are starting to make their way in, but obviously those are combustion powered (still cool though).
This leads me down a funny thought process of how would I make a cheap Chinese imported electric kart seem less safe so I could drive it down the street.
How would a car a small fraction of another car have non-obvious dangers in one-on-one collisions? If you think that a smaller mass object vs a much larger mass object is not going to do lots of damage to the smaller mass object, then a basic understanding of physics seems to be lacking. Then, tack on how much faster the larger mass object can be moving in comparison to the lower mass object, and tell me what's so non-obvious about that.
You seem quite worked up, and seem to be having a discussion about how a motorcycle would perform in a collision with a large car versus a small car colliding with a large car. To be clear, that's not what I'm talking about here. I was picking up on the parent post's question about why a motorcycle should be road legal, and this thing not, when the collision danger was probably equivalent or higher.
I'm not saying that this car is more dangerous in a collision than a motorcycle. It might be, though. This weighs more than a motorcycle, which means more mass involved in the collision, which means energy to be dissipated. In a basic understanding of physics, this is sometimes referred to as the mass-energy equivalence. It's denoted by the formula E = mc2 which is fairly well known.
It's not just about mass though, is it? It's not even just about collision safety.
Cars have features like airbags, crush zones and impact protection cells to make collisions more survivable. Some of these features are optional, but many are mandated by governments on new cars.
One of the reasons this vehicle would not be road legal is because a passenger getting in to the vehicle, or someone buying it second hand, would reasonably expect it to have these features. This is what I mean by obvious and non-obvious dangers. A motorcycle has obvious dangers. It's clear to anyone that if a car t-bones you, that car will impact your body directly. This car, however, has the appearance of "a newish car". What that means to someone in a developed country like Australia is "a vehicle that meets basic safety standards". This vehicle contravenes that expectation in a non-obvious way.
Regulations also exist around things like handling dynamics in collision avoidance scenarios. How does this vehicle perform if you need to swerve suddenly to avoid a kid that has run out in the street? Will it turn or skid onwards? Will it roll over? Will something else happen? It might perform wonderfully, but the certifying authority doesn't have any reliable information that someone reliable has tested it.
New vehicles sold also have regulations around the reliability of individual components. The master cylinder for the braking system must be manufactured to a given standard of quality. If the plastic casting is crappy and the lid blows off when you hit the brakes, that's a bad thing and someone could be hurt. Preventing things like this happening to unsuspecting bystanders is why we live in a society that has agreed to place restrictions upon itself for the greater good.
I wonder if there's a solution similar to experimental aeroplanes, e.g. a massive sticker which essentially says "THIS IS NOT A CERTIFIED PLANE, IT COULD BE DANGEROUS"
Yeah totally! That’s a path that regulators often take rather than banning something. It’s all part of the same root as I see it. Removing non-obvious dangers or turning them into obvious ones.
You’d still need to satisfy the requirement that they don’t pose a threat to non-occupants though. Pedestrian and bystander safety is a thing. Might be taken care of by limiting the max speed.
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Those planes are allowed to be flown for specific testing purposes only. You cannot fly passengers nor even cargo with them. And each flight crew member must have a very specific, essential role. You can't fly e.g. a tourist and call him "mission specialist" to get around the rules.
Looking at the way the "frame" is built on these, I'm not sure it would fare well in a crash with even a Fiat 500. It appears to have zero crash safety.
Oh wow, I didn't even know they made an electric smart, much less a convertible one. Not sure how good the EV part of that was (the article hints that it was terrible) but the form factor is really nice.
The Honda-e is not available at all in the US. The top line excuse is that side-view cameras are still not street legal in the US (though regulators are supposed to finally reconvene on that any day now) and the car's profile can't retrofit mirrors. But the current bottom line seems a disinterest from Honda of America in any EV products right now.
Its wheelbase is 8 inches longer than the Fiat 500, and it’s overall 10" longer. It’s by no means a big car, but it’s quite a bit bigger than a traditional city car.
$7k gets you a really nice compact pickup, not anything the average HNer would buy, but nice enough for farm duty and new enough to not need anything for years. And you can drive it down the street. And when you snap something doing farmer stuff (which you will, because farmer) you can go buy a replacement part easily.
As someone that lives on a farm, I was thinking the same, you're getting a reasonable second hand ute "paddock basher" at that price.
At the same time I love seeing this and where its going. I always think of Luke on his uncles farm in star wars and that farm work will increasing change more to fixing the machines doing the job, than the job itself. And I suspect ongoing electric powered will suit farmers more than anyone as they have the space and lack of neighbours to create power themselves.
These could be competitive with a Kioti for golf courses, fairgrounds, and horse farms. If they there were a utv track kit option, doubly so in places with winters.
>Golf carts, UTV's, ATV's, minibikes, on the roads around here are not at all unusual. Not legal, but I only know of one case of someone getting ticketed.
Although I do wonder if all the conveniences that makes this more carlike combined with its uniqueness in the US would make it more likely to receive legal pushback. Something that clearly isn't even attempting to be a street legal vehicle like a golf cart is easier to excuse. A cop who sees this might be more suspicious of the vehicle and how you actually use it.
My neighbor with about 35 acres has a golf cart she drives around. Probably wouldn't need this as she also has a tractor and a pickup but can easily imagine something like this for a large property.
Another neighbor has an ATV he uses for snow plowing his long driveway. You need to keep on top of things relative to plowing with a pickup but he seems to manage.
But yeah. If you're going to have farm vehicles are probably better and more standard options.
rust issues on cars are actually caused by water pooling in inside cavities and rusting its way out over time because they don't dry out. water on the outside of a piece of metal isn't really that serious a threat for rusting its way in (you see lots of cars driven for years with unrepaired body damage and they don't rust away)
I don't imagine the rust he saw was bubbling up through the paint from inside, I doubt it's a problem
Possibly, but then 1) it won't require much in the way of maintenance or replacement parts, being a really low end EV, and 2) I suspect everything but the chassis is bog standard stuff you can get anywhere. This isn't going to be like a car with its hundreds (thousands?) of molded ABS parts everywhere.
I'm not sure if thats really a good deal. You can find some Leafs with new bats for like $3000-4000 all over. And thats road legal anywhere. Maybe chop the top and you got a pickup.
You don't have to deal with getting fuel for it. Sure the used truck can drive to a gas station (instead of gas cans), but it is still a hassle. Large farms will have fuel tanks behind the barn so they can drive a tractor over to fill it, but most people don't go through enough fuel to make that worth it. This you just plug in when you are done and it is always ready to go.
If you use this all day it probably won't work, but most small property owners would use it for an hour or two (over the course of an entire day), and so it always has plenty of range. I don't see why they sell gas lawn mowers at WalMart (do they still?) as for home owners electric now makes more sense than dealing with gas. Sure the big lawn mowing companies use their mowers more in a day than the battery will last, but the small home owner doesn't.
> glass has to come from DOT-registered glass factories, the backup camera has to come from DOT-registered backup camera factories, etc. It’s not enough to simply go 25 mph and have seat belts and blinkers... Even if the cars had all the necessary DOT parts, the factory that produces them in China also has to be registered with the NHTSA to allow the cars to be street legal in the US.
Some of this makes sense. Much of it doesn't, or could be vastly simplified for low-speed use cases.
It's just not true - the author of this article doesn't understand FMVSS or the process.
How this works is basically:
1) There are safety guidelines (FMVSS) governing classes of motor vehicles. For LSVs, the regulations are _extremely_ simple. There's no such thing as a "DOT reverse camera factory." https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/49/571.500
2) The manufacturer must self-attest that the vehicle complies, and affix a label confirming this self-attestation.
That's pretty much it. Now the NHTSA will do what they need to to enforce their rules. If customers complain or independent testing reveals a violation, they will require a recall or ban certain vehicles or makes, or sue the manufacturer or importer.
But there's no reason these vehicles couldn't be compliant if the manufacturer was willing to attest, and also no such weirdness as "DOT factories."
I'm the author of that article, and it is true. You've linked to the correct law, but you didn't read it fully. Even if we drill down on a single item, like the backup camera you mentioned, then a more careful reading of the law shows the full requirements.
There you can see the reverse camera requirement is as follows:
"(11) Low-speed vehicles shall comply with the rear visibility requirements specified in paragraphs S6.2 of FMVSS No. 111."
Follow that through to the full requirements for backup cameras in FMCSS No. 111 and you'll see that the LSV backup camera requirements are the same as the backup camera requirements for full motor vehicles. That includes that the factory that produces it is registered with the NHTSA. It's not enough for the chinese factory to claim that they meet the camera depth of field requirements, angle of vision requirements, color requirements, etc. They have to be registered with the NHTSA, after which they will be listed in the DOT database for registered manufacturers, as well as produce the product to those specific standards. So yes, there very much is a such thing as a "DOT reverse camera factory." If you consult the DOT's own online database, you'll find all of them listed.
Millions of things are stamped "not for highway use" not because they don't comply with the relevant FMVSS but because the manufacturer doesn't know, doesn't care and doesn't want to think about it or risk being wrong.
Absolutely, and for the "full" FMVSS this makes sense - the stakes are high and the rules are a byzantine mess in a lot of areas (for example, making sure specific warning lights aren't obscured at each possible angle of a telescoping and tilting steering column).
But, for LSV the requirements are so simple that this is much easier, though.
This is not correct. You're part way there. Things like "have lights, DOT windshield, DOT seat belts, doesn't go over 25 mph" etc are all in fact requirements. But those are the simple ones. The trickier ones are what keep most of these from being street legal. The noisemaker has to meet all the FMVSS requirements of noisemakers in full electric cars like Teslas, Nissan Leafs, etc. The backup cameras have to meet the full FMVSS requirements for backup cameras in all full size cars. Even the factory doing the assembling has to be registered with the NHTSA and have a WMI - it's not enough to build your own factory and self certify. If you don't have NHTSA registration, a WMI and vin numbers that match a specific decoding sequence on file with the NHTSA for your specific factory (Which is why your factory has to be registered with NHTSA), your LSVs aren't street legal at the federal level and can't be imported to the US legally for on-road use if produced abroad. This is all in the document you've linked, you just haven't followed through to the sections listed in each requirement to see what the specific requirements actually are.
Importing EVs to the US at any decent scale would be a big can of worm. At least until there’s serious US produced competition in that specific segment. Japan cars getting publicly bashed was 40 years ago; times have changed, but touching the auto industry is still a pretty emotional topic for a lot of people (coughTesla fanscough)
> Millions of things are stamped "not for highway use" not because
And those things cannot be registered to be driven on public roadways. That's going back to the beginning of the discussion - this truck cannot be registered to be driven on public roadways.
It won't be, because those regulations aren't in place to ensure safety, they're in place to be a barrier to small manufacturers getting started and competing with the incumbent US Auto makers.
Well, obviously everything makes sense! Atleast when knowing the reason for that is simply very successful lobbying by established companies to prevent anyone from entering any vehicle or vehicle supplying market without enormous upfront costs .
Imagine hitting a pedestrian at 4mph on the side of the road with one of your headlights. The headlight shatters.
However, the light turned out to not actually be safety glass and not shatter in harmless cubes but in nasty long splinters that hit an artery and the pedestrian bleeds out on the side of the road. The Chinese company won't give a shit because they have no certification so nothing to lose. They didn't even export it to you, some random AliExpress seller did. So you end up in jail for it.
This kind of learning from previous mistakes informed the complex legislation around vehicles. Most of these things have good reason, not just lobbying. Manufacturers love cutting costs and you need a big stick to keep them honest. Remember the Ford Pinto? The Boeing 737MAX? Or what Volkswagen did to trick emissions tests? In fact I'd be surprised if the factories welcome all the paperwork that comes with it.
In the end it's not to protect the industry, it's to protect the people (not just you but other road users as well) from an "all too eager to cut corners" industry. And random Chinese factories love cutting corners even more and there's virtually no risk to them. The only way to be sure is to have the whole chain certified.
It's hard to say for sure without the stated reasons but I'd bet that most of those requirements were written following manufacturing mistakes that resulted in injury.
It's much more like the process for standardizing tech specs than the "lItErAlLy WrItTeN iN bLoOd" that people like to claim.
A lot the specific requirements were proactively created because it's easier for everyone if we all just agree that a particular widget will have certain specs because then the engineers and manufactures can behave accordingly without thinking about it and managing it or there were a couple competing "not quite standard" ways of doing something and they just kinda picked the better looking one.
We have a Toro Workman electric cart on our small farm. It's extremely useful even while being quite basic and powered by lead-acid batteries. We bought it used a while ago but a new one would cost 15k€. The new ones are a little nicer but still mostly unchanged over the years. John Deere sells a Gator that's almost the same thing. I'm definitely hoping some of these manufacturers shake up this market. Hopefully the small tractor and skid steer markets as well although that's quite a bit more complex because of managing the attachments. Battery weight is irrelevant and so is range for most people, so lead-acid is fine for all these applications. LFP can be a bonus though. A few things have started popping up but nothing really good. A lot of the time it's people attaching an electric motor to an overly complicated transmission designed for the shortcomings of gas/diesel motors.
This whole article is so pervasively American that it was just about unreadable to me. It's a fairly rare and quite novel experience: it's in my native language, but so completely based on US assumptions and presumption of shared knowledge that I do not have, that it just... doesn't parse.
* His parents apparently live on some plot of land the size of a largish city. Presumably alone?
* The vehicle is a perfectly normal full-size truck of some kind, but he keeps talking about it as if it were a toy. He constantly compares it to a "golf cart" as if those were everyday things. I played golf for a decade and have never seen one except on TV. I presume it's a thing for morbidly-obese Americans?
* It is a real car but it doesn't comply with fnargle-wurgle edict 27B § 42 from the Glarg of Bargwargle, but obviously everyone knows the Bargwargle so no need to explain that.
* I bought it from China for only $LOTS but really it was a cost of $LOTS because $LOTS doesn't count and $LOTS is always there anyway so it's OK to pay $LOTS for a toy. Hello fellow humans! I am a perfectly normal human!
* It is a toy but I can use it on my parent's private city where 100,000 of you peasants from the barbarian lands could live, but we are not barbarians and anyway we shoot barbarians here.
Such a very strange article. Such a very strange country.
This is a cheap toy truck for pretty much any industrialized country. It’s weird to compare heavy machinery sizes as if it was up to personal preferences.
It is only toy-sized by US standards. By the standards of pretty much any other country in the world, it's a normal-sized vehicle, even a large one. Go read about tuk-tuks. Visit Asia some time.
Vitriol?
Pity for a culture so dependent on a machine I personally dislike: the motor car.
Distaste and disdain for a culture whose example is destroying the world.
> By the standards of pretty much any other country in the world, it's a normal-sized vehicle, even a large one.
It's not much bigger than a quad bike. It would just about fit in the back of my Range Rover if I put the seats down.
> Go read about tuk-tuks.
Tuk-tuks aren't real vehicles either. You can't even make them road-legal in the UK, where the most you need to do is "does it have some sort of brake and some sort of mudguard on all its road wheels, some sort of brake light, and some sort of exhaust silencer?"
> The vehicle is a perfectly normal full-size truck of some kind, but he keeps talking about it as if it were a toy
It's the size of one of those little Kubota ATVs that can carry roughly a 25kg bag of feed and a bale of hay. It's limited to 25mph. If you wanted it to go faster than 25mph, you could load it into the bed of a standard-size Ford Transit.
It's a tiny wee electric buggy that you could *just about* make road-legal under the UK's famously lax laws.
Google the phrase "tuk-tuk" and learn about how such small vehicles are the backbone of the economies of countries home to an aggregate population about ten times that of the USA.
Tuk Tuks go a lot faster than 25 mph and they aren't trucks. I'm not sure why you are so upset about so many things in an article about a scaled down electric truck. Google polaris and you can see that there have already been things like this sold for years. Your whole meltdown over this is pretty bizarre.
I have always thought that we need to make a better distinction between neighborhood vs city vs highway vehicles. A cheap compact <30 mph car that I can use for grocery runs and other quick errands around town would be fantastic, but there's zero market for something like it (Smart sadly fizzled out), mainly because of the onerous manufacturing and certification requirements mentioned in the article.
>there's zero market for something like it (Smart sadly fizzled out), mainly because of the onerous manufacturing and certification requirements mentioned in the article.
Well, and most people don't want a specialized vehicle they can only use on certain roads for certain purposes but which take a spot on their property, need to be maintained at some level, etc. Maybe have some costs for registration, licensing, etc.
If you have an actual farm you may have a tractor, etc. but most people don't want a vehicle they can only use for limited purposes. And, as soon as you're on public roads, things like insurance come into play as well.
Safety doesn’t seem to be a major factor for a farm truck. “The front won’t fall off” seems to be a non-issue based on his 1 year update.
They must’ve cut corners, but if you’re not taking this on public roads they’re not corners you care much about anyway. At $2000 you’re not going to do much better.
See the points in the article about various items having to come from DoT registered factories to make a street legal vehicle. Compliance with those regulations comes with costs, so there is one avenue of cost saving. Edit: As other posters are pointing out that 'DoT Factories' thing is incorrect. Welp that's what I get for trusting the source.
Not that I am saying it appears to be replete with crumple zones or ride-over protection or side curtain airbags or other safety features we would appreciate. But then I wouldn't expect to get T-Boned by an inattentive driver in a lifted F-550 when I'm tooting around my own property clearing fallen branches after a windstorm.
Alternatively (or in addition), one of the most effective knobs you can turn to increase the efficiency of delivering products/services is the human suffering knob.
Safety at a blistering speed of checks article 25 mph? Who in their right mind would design for safety if the thing can't even outpace a professional cyclist?
25mph is where lethality starts to go up, but that doesn’t mean things going 24mph harmlessly bounce off of pedestrians (good news, you’re not dead. Bad news, you can’t work for long enough to go bankrupt). This still weighs a lot more than a cyclist does and it’s reasonable to say that there should be a safety bar to reduce serious injuries even if that’s a lot lower than a vehicle which can go 100mph.
If you think 25mph is safe, try smashing your face against a tree at 25mph. Or run as fast as you can face first into a brick wall. I bet you can't run 25mph.
Why run? I've hit a brick wall going downhill on a bike. It hurts like hell, but it just hurt like hell. 25 mph is not enough to even guarantee a serious injury (even though it can lead to that, and yeah, in freak accidents can even kill you). However, this vehicles absolute top speed is 25 mph, unloaded. That's why I called out the top speed. It's not going to go 25 mph 99.99% of the time, it'll be going 10 or 15.
Yeah, but the odds of the thing ever actually going top speed are basically zero. Even with a load in the back it's never in a million years reaching that speed.
Or a bike accident. Yeah it's going to hurt, you might even break some things, but for it to be any more than that would be the definition of a freak accident.
> I also want to add some mounts on the hydraulic lifting bed so my parents can pickup their trash cans and drive them down their country road-like driveway all the way to the public road for trash pickup.
Helpful tip for anyone else with a really long driveway like mine: I hooked a couple of straps to the back of my golf cart with extra large carabiners on the loose end that I can easily clip on to my trash cans. Works great and cost me under $40. Initially I kept trying to think of ways to lift/mount the trash cans to my cart but the cans can get pretty heavy once full. Since they already have wheels, I just tilt them slightly, clip on the carabiners, and off I go.
What we really need is are manufacturers providing kits. Kit cars aren't subject to all these regulations. I think the cap is 2000 model units per year though.
So this is $3500 EV vehicle that has 40 miles range and 25 mph max speed. Few tweaks here and there and these will be perfect to sell in US or anywhere else. Tesla needs to up their game on getting $5k/$10k EVs delivered or their dream of fossil fuel vehicles would be fulfilled by someone else.
He says it cost 7k. Compared to the price of a new golf cart thats actually not bad at all. Might be useful in places where golf carts are street legal, which seems to be getting more popular in the US.
That's been my feeling with ChangLi cars in general. USD$2000 cars that are considered "fun" to drive on Alibaba seems very much like a leading indicator for a disruption curve of some sort. (Imagine if you saw $2000 cars on Amazon tomorrow.) A lot of people are still assuming the base price of EVs is going to remain around current ICE prices or worse the current ICE price plus "EV luxury tax" (which often seems to be misattributed to battery costs and/or battery supply chain issues), but ChangLi seems to be showing us that assumption may not hold up in the long term (especially once supply chain issues are sorted) and playfully remind us that there's a greater less explored vehicle spectrum space between "golf cart" and "real car" that ICE extremely underserved and EVs open up more niches to easily/enjoyably explore.
This is exactly the thing that I want. Too bad it's so hard to import. I am not willing to put up with any hassle. I just want a tiny open-bed vehicle that I can take around SF and the Bay Area. I'm happy to avoid freeways and stuff, though it will legitimately suck that I can't get over to the other side of the Bay with this.
>the backup camera has to come from DOT-registered backup camera factories
Does that mean you can't have a street legal car in the US without a backup camera? Or if it does have a backup camera it has to come from a DOT-registered factory? If the latter then why not just disable it? Or that's not even enough?
The author of this article does not understand FMVSS or DOT regulations.
1) Yes, this is true, for several years the FMVSS has required backup cameras for full speed cars. However, this isn't true for low speed vehicles.
2) This just isn't true at all. FMVSS do not require factories to be certified in any specific way. https://www.rearviewsafety.com/pub/static/version1558698936/... These are the requirements. Manufacturers self-attest that they comply. The NHTSA reserves the right to respond to complaints or independently inspect their vehicles. They don't inspect or register "factories."
> It sure beats a gas-powered UTV since I never have to fill it up or choke on exhaust.
I don't know much about this site or the article author, but I have a hard time believing that this is anything but a dramatic exaggeration.
I own a farm. I (and no one I know) would never seriously rely on an electric vehicle for utility. In general the batteries just aren't there and the rate at which they lose capacity is just too high to justify the cost. For $7,000 you could have a used UTV/SXS or a quad with a trailer in most markets. Both would handily outdo this Alibaba amalgamation.
I won't even get into all the horror stories about uncaught grounds and battery safety for things on that site or the fact that preferring electric to ICEs is more of a virtue signal than net benefit for the planet. Cool experiment though.
Toro and John Deere have been selling electric versions of their UTVs for decades now. They work great too. Plenty of farms use them and there's plenty to like in the EV models even with just lead-acid batteries.
You might want to cruise the comments for the several people linking to the "one year later" article, which does a pretty good job showing these to be non-issues.
They don't have the required Amazon affiliate disclosure before their affiliate links. It's just asking for trouble. Having it at the bottom is not enough for Amazon and they don't even use the correct wording either
Decent deal. Probably <4k if purchased and assembled within China. Cheaper than most electric mountain bikes.
Looks like electric ATVs/UTVs are around 15k, which would be a rough comp.
Electric bikes / scooters / etc will hopefully become much more commonplace. Way cheaper than cars, and potentially more exercise. Hopefully more special purpose trails for bikes / pedestrians are created to accommodate demand. Certain places like the Netherlands do a great job at accommodating non-vehicle commuting.
Street legal and insurance (even driving to neighbour and dump rubbish as in the articles) existed for a reason. The cost might not. But the item is needed in case any accident happened.
It is not your home project with Bluetooth chip. It is moving machine that can hurt and kill.
Good fun I guess and help the totalitarian country one more us$ dollars. God bless America.
Self-built cars are usually a completely different process, and also don't involve import.
But, the author of the article also massively overstates the requirements for a legal vehicle under the Low Speed Vehicle rules. The full FMVSS rules are gargantuan, complex, and hard to meet, but the LSV rules really aren't.
They basically need to not go 25mph, meet dimension and weight requirements, and have lights, reflectors, seat belts, and an approved windshield. https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/49/571.500
The manufacturer then self-attests that the vehicle meets FMVSS, and submits paperwork documenting their VIN format. Unless there are complaints or an investigation, that's pretty much it.
> Factory Five products are expressly sold for custom car-building, racing and off-road use and are not intended to be used in conventional passenger or other legal highway applications.
Varies by state. Some states allow you to have a kit car inspected and certified to drive on the street. Others require that the car be built from the frame of an already street legal vehicle. Some places put strict limits on the amount of miles it can be driven a year, and you'll likely need to shop around for specialty insurance to cover driving it.
In addition to what other commenters mentioned, in some states there is a legal gray area for registering a vehicle as just modifications on top of a donor vehicle that's already street legal. Commonly you start with a donor as a base anyway and no one is going to independently verify that your mods align with DOT standards.
If those were imported massively in usa or canada [and take a chunk off the 2k shipping and other extra fees that could be averaged down], they would sell tons even if not street legal, awesome base for hacking or small vehicle for small farms or woodlands.
Can-Am defender, AC Prowler, Honda Pioneer, any number of John Deere UTVs, etc. Pretty much every line of farm-focused UTV has a dump bed option...
I'm guessing when you hear UTV you're thinking of the 60MPH off-road blitzing side by sides that are so popular at the dunes these days, but that's only part of the market for these.
Once you limit to EV the choices are pretty limited though. Toro and Deere have decent options and all the others at most have a retrofitted electric motor to a transmission designed for gas/diesel. Hopefully the ramp up of LFP battery production revamps this market quite a bit.
Sure, but we were talking about this being an excellent choice given what it offers at its operational price tag of $7000, having conveniences no UTV has in that bracket.
All of the ones you listed are fine UTVs, but they also cost literally twice as much =)
How else do you move things around a farm? Diesel trucks are also a waste and don't come with a hydraulic dump bed unless you spend a lot more than the $7k he paid.
I think there's a large education gap surround EVs that needs to be filled. Hopefully more articles and experiments like this continue to appear. If you have an EV, consider spreading the word - good and bad. It's important to talk about all aspects to both bring more users into the EV fold, and address existing issues.