I make fun of electric vehicles all the time on here, mostly because the ones you can afford are godawful in their design and the ones that aren’t godawful in their design, you can’t afford. The EZ-EV may not be able to fix all of these problems, but if nothing else, it’s pretty neat.
Albeit that the EZ-EV is technically a motorcycle for the purposes of the law, but it was designed and developed to be, well, an easily built electric vehicle:
The idea now is take the EZ-EV open source: to build it from parts available off the shelf as much as possible, and to make the parts that have to be custom as simple as possible to build. For example, yeah, the current model is an open cabin, but the idea to design body panels that can be printed out on a 3D printer and just popped into the chassis.
Currently, the EZ-EV team is running a crowdfunding campaign, and the price is a little steep: A chassis will run you $10,000. But there are other rewards and, hey, it beats owning a MiEV.
ZWheelz [IndieGoGo]