Eli Electric — A New Neighborhood Electric Vehicle

These folks claim to have “re-imagined” the neighborhood EV and are looking for investors to get them into production.  For those new to this industry, a NEV has a top speed of 25 MPH and is therefore intended to be sold to people with short commutes through dense traffic.

When I got into this field in 2008, these vehicles, then called LSEVs (low speed EVs) were a hot topic.  A typical alt-car expo had five or ten such offerings–all in the prototype stage.  To date, there have been, I’ll guess, a few hundred thousand actually sold in the U.S.

What the world found was that, outside of gated communities, there was no market for them.  Almost all driving involves roads on which 25 MPV is not only inappropriate; it’s dangerous.   There really are no “short commutes through uniformly dense traffic.”  There is a hair’s breadth between the market for golf carts and that for full-speed automobiles.

I will be quite surprised if these people ever get into the manufacturing stage.