NEVs: A Viable Urban Transportation Alternative

By George Zens

With gas prices reaching four dollars a gallon, more and more people are finally realizing what all the discussions about global warming could not: that our automobile-based traffic system is unsustainable. Part of the solution could be neighborhood electric vehicles, small cars specifically designed for local traffic. They are legal in many Wisconsin communities.

On June 3 this year, the Middleton city council unanimously approved an ordinance allowing neighborhood electric vehicles on city streets, thus joining more than a dozen other Wisconsin municipalities with similar ordinances.

“Now it will be interesting to see who will own the first one in Middleton,” Mayor Kurt Sonnentag commented.

Neighborhood electric vehicles (also known by the unavoidable acronym NEVs) started out in the United States as battery-powered golf carts in Florida retirement communities. As the name implies, golf carts are designed for use on closed golf courses, so when residents started driving them on local roads, they ran into some problems with the law-enforcement community.

Their promotion, under federal regulations, to neighborhood electric vehicles, means that they can be driven on urban roads if they meet the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s federal motor vehicle standard for low-speed vehicles. Cars that are commercially available as NEVs must be certified as meeting those standards.

Accordingly, an NEV must have four wheels, accelerate to 20 miles per hour (mph) within one mile of operation, have a maximum speed of 25 mph on a level paved surface and a “gross vehicle weight rating” of less than 3,000 pounds. It must also be propelled by an electric motor, which means that gas-powered golf carts for instance do not qualify.

NEVs have windshields, windshield wipers, three-point seatbelts, headlights (which must be on during operation), rear lights, brake lights, turn signals (although in Wisconsin one wonders why, since most drivers don’t seem to know how to use them) and rear-view mirrors. The only thing they don’t need is airbags.

In Wisconsin, NEVs may be driven on local roads that have speed limits of 35 mph or less, assuming the municipality in question has passed an ordinance allowing their use. The operator also needs a valid driver’s license.

These neighborhood electric vehicles are licensed and registered through the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, just like regular gasoline-powered vehicles.
This little administrative detail removed a big hurdle to the spread of NEVs in Wisconsin. Until the state government passed the appropriate law, municipalities were responsible for licensing and registering NEVs, which de facto meant that they didn’t.

Neighborhood electric vehicles, also known as low-speed electric vehicles, are, just like regular-speed electric vehicles, not new. In fact, historically electric vehicles predate gasoline-powered automobiles by several decades.

The first electric vehicles were built in Scotland and in the Netherlands in the 1830s, although it wasn’t until the electric storage battery was invented in the 1860s and 1880s in France that the electric vehicle became a realistic proposition.

In the United States, the first electric-powered automobile was built in Des Moines, Iowa, and the first automobile to exceed 60 miles per hour was a French electric car.

At the turn of the twentieth century, in the United States, more cars were powered by electricity than gasoline: 38 percent electric and 22 percent gasoline. The rest, 40 percent, was – steam.

For a number of reasons – political, technical and commercial, we won’t go into that here – electricity quickly faded into oblivion, and sporadic revival attempts consistently failed.

Whether neighborhood electric vehicles are here to stay, and whether regular-size electric vehicles now have a brighter future remains to be seen, but with gasoline prices reaching four dollars a gallon and battery technology quickly improving, the odds are that electric-powered vehicles can provide a viable alternative to the conventional fossil-fuel-driven car.

Neighborhood electric vehicles are not an American exclusive. In fact, they have been popular for a number of years in other countries, including India, Italy, the UK, Switzerland and Norway.

While of limited use in rural areas, where road conditions make their use impractical, they offer a great alternative to gasoline- (or diesel-) powered vehicles in urban and suburban communities, where up to 90 percent of all automobile trips are local anyway.

All things considered, an NEV’s operating costs are only about ten percent of a regular vehicle’s, including very low maintenance expenses. An electric motor doesn’t need oil changes for instance, and since it has very few moving parts, it also has a lot less mechanical failures – a car repair shop’s worst nightmare: what’s to fix? They also get the equivalent of 200 to 400 miles per gallon.

On the other hand, in Wisconsin at least, an electric vehicle most likely will still contribute to air pollution and be powered by fossil fuels, at least indirectly. After all, the electricity has to come from somewhere, and since our utilities keep relying on out-dated, polluting coal plants to produce electricity, calling electric vehicles ‘no-emission vehicles’ is not quite accurate. Unless, of course, the electricity comes from solar power or wind generators.

Broadly speaking, neighborhood electric vehicles come in two categories: as glorified golf carts and as real, if small, cars.

Green Autos in Janesville has been operating as an electric-car dealership since August of last year. They currently sell neighborhood electric vehicles from two manufacturers, Zenn and Miles.

Ironically, when Chris Thompson and his father Tim opened their business, they couldn’t even take the cars out for a test-drive, since Janesville didn’t pass its NEV-ordinance until February this year.

So, they spent most of last year traveling and educating the public, including many municipal councils and boards, about the benefits of neighborhood electric vehicles. But the climate has quickly become more favorable to them in recent months:

“Now that most metropolitan areas have passed their ordinances, we are selling the vehicles,” says Chris Thompson. “The rate is about five to six vehicles per month, although we are hopeful to reach ten to 15 a month soon.”

Zenn, which stands for ‘Zero Emission No Noise’, is a Canadian manufacturer that builds NEVs based on the French Groupe Bénéteau microcar MC1. In France it is available with a diesel engine, while Zenn imports it as a ‘glider’, i.e. the shell without engine or transmission, and then installs the electric components, like motor and batteries.

The Zenn looks and feels like a real car, and it is available with many features standard on conventional vehicles, including heater, air conditioning, power windows and locks, remote keyless entry and panoramic sunroof.

The Zenn, like all neighborhood electric vehicles, being a strictly urban car, has a limited range of about 35 miles per full charge. To charge the lead-acid batteries the car is simply plugged into a regular 110-Volt outlet. After four hours, the battery is 80 percent recharged, one hundred percent after eight hours.

This limited range is often considered to be an electric vehicle’s biggest disadvantage.

Recent and on-going technological advances, however, might very well eliminate that handicap in a near future. Already, batteries are available that provide full-size electric vehicles with ranges of several hundred miles, and one company, EEStor, based in Cedar Park, Texas, claims to be close to introducing a commercially viable battery based on barium-titanate ultracapacitor architecture.

Their battery-ultracapacitor hybrid is said to have almost ten times the capacity (i.e. range) of a traditional lead-acid battery, and to be rechargeable in minutes rather than hours.

Zenn Motors is part-owner of EEStor and hopes to be able to use the technology in its vehicles in the near future. There is, however, also considerable skepticism in the scientific and engineering communities about the commercial feasibility of this battery-ultracapacitor.

Next-generation lithium-ion batteries seem to hold more immediate promise (if they don’t go up in flames anymore), and General Motors and Toyota are building plug-in hybrids around them.

While Zenn concentrates strictly on neighborhood electric vehicles, Miles, the other brand available at Green Autos, wants to reach further.

Their ZX40 NEV comes in several configurations, including as a small pick-up truck. But Miles is also planning to introduce the XS500, “the world’s first affordable, mass-produced all-electric highway-speed vehicle”, next year. Capable of speeds of up to 80 miles per hour and a range of more than 120 miles on a single charge, this mid-size sedan offers more possibilities than the NEVs. It will be fully equipped, including airbags, and comply with all federal safety requirements.

But it comes at a price: While the Zenn and Miles NEVs cost upwards from $16,000, depending on equipment level, the full-size Miles will cost double that – comparable to a Toyota Prius hybrid.

On the other hand: at a fraction the operating costs of a standard vehicle, these electrical vehicles are really quite competitively priced.

As Chris Thompson explains, Green Autos is now getting set up to sell electric SmartCars:

“Real SmartCars, converted to electric. They’ll reach a top speed of about 75 miles per hour and have a range of 350 miles. Price: about $30,000.”

Chris Thompson has already seen a change in his customer base:

“At first our main customers were typical tree huggers, but now it is everybody who is tired of paying for gas.”

Neighborhood electric vehicles are becoming popular with parents, too - and their teenage kids:

“NEV’s have built-in parental controls: they are cheap to run, kids can’t go far in them and they can’t speed,” Chris Thompson says. “The Zenn’s plastic body is also fairly damage-resistant.”

Their main drawback, the limited range between charges, is also about to become less of an issue, with more and more employers beginning to install charging ports in their employee parking lots, and even Wal-Mart working on introducing “green” parking spaces with charging ports for its customers.

“It only costs them pennies in electricity, and makes them look really good.”

A few miles north of Janesville, in Stoughton, Ozee Cars also started selling neighborhood electric vehicles a few months ago.

Mike Zweep, who owns Ozee Cars together with his wife Lucy, daughter and son-in-law, became interested in NEVs when Stoughton passed its ordinance making NEVs street-legal. He became really interested when gas prices his $3 a gallon:

“I got a demo vehicle and was hooked. Then one thing led to another and we ended up with a dealership through American Custom Golf Cars.”

American Custom Golf Cars is a California-based manufacturer of neighborhood electric vehicles made to look like miniature versions of - delicious irony – gas guzzlers like the Hummer and Cadillac Escalade, as well as roadsters.

Ozee Cars also sells golf cart-based passenger and utility vehicles manufactured in Wisconsin by Columbia ParCar Corporation.

All of these cars are essentially three-season vehicles, but, as Lucy Zweep explains, “they can be used year-round with the appropriate equipment and clothing.”

Dymac electric mini trucks and mini vans, also available through Ozee Cars, look like real pick-up trucks and seven-passenger mini vans, but they are really NEVs.

Prices range from about $9,000 for a basic golf cart-based NEV to $20,000 for the larger, higher-end models.

With a range varying between 30 and 70 miles between charges and operating costs of about a penny per mile, according to Mike Zweep, it is not surprising that Ozee Cars not only sells to residential customers, but has also generated a lot of interest among institutional and public users, including municipalities, utilities and health care organizations. Mike Zweep:

“This is the future.”