Yesterday a friend and I unloaded two new vehicles in a pilot program to resolve impasses that plague contemporary transportation today, including urban gridlock and EV issues involving energy supply and battery re-charging.
The vehicles are in a category unfamiliar to most people. The name of the category forces me to lead with the bad news first…
…the bad news: they are in a category called “Low Speed Vehicles” (LSV).
AKA “Neighbourhood Electric Vehicles” (NEVs), LSVs are restricted to speeds of 40-50 km/h (25-30 mph). They are street legal on most US roads marked as 35 mph or less.
So with this restriction, why would anybody want one?
On congested, high-traffic streets, LSVs can travel across town just as quickly as a standard vehicle. Nearly 50% of all vehicle trips are less than 3 miles, and that percentage is even higher within cities.
Given those circumstances, the question can be flipped to ask: “how much car does a person really need?”
LSVs were created to serve a purpose; they were originally designed for short shopping trips and social and recreational use within retirement or other planned, gated communities, especially in the Southern United States. LSVs were established as a separate class of vehicles by the U.S. Department of Transportation in 1998.
Because they are small and low-speed, their batteries are designed to be re-charged on household current. Plug an LSV into any 110 outlet and after an hour you can go 100 km or more (for less than a dollar).
Then they started to escape from the gated communities.
It was realized that they could answer many urban driving needs. Due to traffic congestion, traffic lights, and frequent stops and starts, the average urban driving speed is 32-48 km/h (20-30 mph) – ideal for an LSV range.
The bigger urban problem is parking – which an LSV can help solve.
An LSV takes up the same area as a bicycle. Yet they can have the same characteristics as a car: the one we are working with is made of Canadian aluminum, by profit-sharing workers in a factory north of Toronto. They are all-weather vehicles (important for Canada). Four LSVs fit into the parking space of one regular car. And they can come in truck versions.
They are increasingly accepted as street-legal and in many municipalities by-laws have been passed; the Ontario community of Lambton Shores for example has been allowing this for the past five years; in fact the entire province is running a pilot program until 2028. Across the country, in Sicamous BC, LSVs can be driven on any road with a speed limit of 50 km/h.
So LSVs began to roam the bike paths, speed-limited zones and delivery routes in urban cores. They tend to be one-person vehicles, though they can be reconfigured. This is an older video of the car we are working with as it weaves in and out of traffic, and many LSVs would have the same benefits (side-note: the noise problem described in the video has been solved, and the price is less than US$7,500).
LSVs can benefit to the whole community because they enhance economic as well as social goals. They expand the boundaries of those seeking employment opportunities. They help businesses deliver goods to areas where trucks are too much and two-wheelers are too little. They help those with handicaps get transport to either their destination or to a mass transit hub. They aid in the delivery of medical supplies to small-grained clinics among diverse neighbourhoods. Students can use them to reach campus from distance (more affordable) locations. Delivery service drivers can traverse neighborhoods with better visibility, safety and warmth (as needed), in quiet mode.
In a nutshell, LSVs may help with environmental, energy and over-crowding challenges.
In fact, because they use the same electrical current as household appliances, they avoid a snag in the current EV design.
Today’s EVs need special chargers to ‘refuel’. Installing at-home chargers can run about $2,000 upfront, and insurance generally costs more. Household power would cost $60/month. Re-charging can cost $10-$30 at a commercial re-charging site. A ‘fast charge’ takes 15-30 minutes, while a normal charge would be about eight hours. Maintenance costs might be lower, but you'll likely buy more tires because heavier full-sized EVs run them down faster.
All this transpires because the battery storage of electricity is a “thin’ form of energy. Gas has much more power in a smaller volume. This is somewhat offset by the fact that in a gas car, only 16 to 25 percent of the fuel energy actually goes into the wheels — the rest is lost mostly in the form of heat from the exploding gas. In an electric car, on the other hand, 87 to 91 percent of the energy in the battery goes to do the work of movement. This was known to Elon Musk and the Tesla designers when they started their campaign to see the merits of EVs, and they did a superlative job at stressing the benefits instead of dwelling on the limitations.
The task of installing an EV charging infrastructure on the roads has been a formidable challenge. Companies like ChargePoint and Tesla stepped up and installed some 40,000 Level 2 and Level 3 charging stations across the US. The federal government also provided funding for both the purchase of the EVs and the installation of charging stations.
Still, it is inevitable that in some places like New York, there can be waits of an hour or more to get access to a station.
And to supply the demand for electric power for all these EV charging stations. the US could face increased electricity demand equivalent to about a quarter of all current U.S. electric power use.
For all these reasons, the public mood about EVs has swung from euphoria to extreme caution (read: lower sales).
The benefits of having a vehicle on the road that does not contribute to fossil fuel emissions – assuming the generating plants are not burning coal – are overwhelming, however, and governments are urging the transformation of our oil-based transportation to electricity as quickly as society can move.
Here is where the LSV might find a helpful niche.
A large portion of our driving (60%) is done in urban areas, and most of that is done in an “LSV-friendly zone”: zones marked at 40 km/hr limits. In fact, some studies show that nearly a quarter of all car trips are less than five minutes in duration.
Car drivers also tend to drive alone; passengers are with them only 25% of the time. Only five percent of US commuters use public transit to get to work. Using Public Transport takes on average 1.4–2.6 times longer than driving a car, and for many people with handicaps it is awkward to use.
Interestingly – and totally irrelevant - commuters in places that voted for Biden are more likely to walk, bike, or use transit, and less likely to drive to work alone. Commuters in more conservative metros where a larger share voted for Trump, are more likely to drive to work alone. This reflects the fact that more liberal metros tend also to be denser, more affluent, and more educated.
Back to LSVs:
The calculation becomes: why would you drive a full-sized EV or gas car into an urban core where the parking is costly and/or non-existent? If you are driving alone anyway, could a bike-sized LSV serve your purpose?
Yes, you are giving some things up. On some LSVs there is no air conditioning (open your windows) or much heat, but you are likely only driving a short distance anyway. And you are out of the weather. And perhaps you would be able to park closer to your destination than ever before. Spaces can be set aside for LSV use that would otherwise not be considered for parking, due to a need for paved surfaces for traditional cars…spaces such as portions of park areas or walkways. This is an important strength, because most American cars are parked 95% of their operational lives.
LSVs allow the micro-vehicle transportation system to be coordinated with other city systems: the mass transportation systems, electrical systems, emergency systems, automated community-LSV rentals and so on. It allows for the evolution of a smart approach into an “Intelligent Community” approach: a system-of-systems for a conscious urban environment.
LSVs are easy to operate as well as comfortable to drive. They have a simple throttle and can travel 100 km on one charge – well beyond the average city commute, which is 8.7 km in Canadian cities. It can use speed-limited roads as well as bike paths, and is so compact that each one can fit into a sliver of parking space; four SARITs can fit into one standard parking slot. It re-charges in an hour on standard household current for about $1.00, with no fancy infrastructure. Its battery is the same lithium-phosphate core that Tesla and its Chinese rivals are using. The LSV that is of interest to us is robust; it is designed for the Canadian winter and provides a ‘safety cage’ framework around the driver.
Its performance has been described a “zippy” and “very manoeuvrable. It uses three wheels so it is stable on turns – in testing, it was tipped by 70 degrees and popped back up on its wheels. It’s very manoeuvrable in tight quarters, and it’s easier to see around the triangular front end than over a square hood.
The plan isn’t to replace the automobile for those cross-country trips, but provide an all-weather energy-saving option for commuting or trekking to the bus or train station, and then save space by occupying a sliver of parking space. As cities get even denser and traffic gets worse, something like this might well be an answer.
The LSV market is valued at $0.4-billion in 2023 and is expected to rise to $15-billion by 2028. Demographic trends are helping to push this along; there is a rise in the older population that needs easy short-distance transportation.
This is very early days for us, and I will keep you posted on how the initiative is going! From personal experience, it’s a lot of fun to zip around it!
I do think the world is ready for a small personal vehicle.
More small news later…
Thank you for reading Barry’s Substack.
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