Re-exploring NEV

Don’t give up your SUV or other large vehicles…and still gave gas!

How? By reducing their usage.

You don’t need to use a large gas guzzling vehicle every time you go to the market, hardware store, post office, library, coffee shop, etc. How about using a NEV – Neighborhood Electric Vehicle.

If half or even a third of our daily errands could be handled by a NEV, think how much gas and pollution we could save!

But it will never happen as long as NEVs are restricted to 25 mph.

Who is going to pay thousands of dollars for a vehicle that can’t even keep up with a fast kid on a skate board?

Think about it. If the speed limit around town is 35 to 40 mph and you put a bunch of NEVs on the road limiting their speed to 25 mph, you are actually restricting the normal flow of traffic, causing congestion and increasing the chance of road rage. It won’t work! Can’t our city planners see that?

As for our NEV manufacturers, if you want to entice the general public into buying these small efficient electric vehicles you must do four things:

1) Increase the speed of NEVs to 40 mph.

2) Improve their design to make them more appealing to women.

3) Reduce their cost.

4) Give them unlimited range (to dispel range anxiety) so that a person can get home no matter how far they travel without having to stop for a recharge. It can be done.

Do these four things and you will see a renewed interest in NEVs … not before.

Maybe NEV manufacturers and our city planners could get together on this one so we could keep your SUVs and still save gas while keeping traffic moving.

Stephen Balazs
Panorama City