jason thurber's blog

globally-scoped ramblings

I would buy one!

with 25 comments

The Tango is an ultra-narrow, reasonably high-performance electric commuter “car” that is under development right now. If the price is kept low enough (it seems like the sweet spot for these would be in the neighborhood of $10k) then I think these would sell really well!

Sadly, no one to-date has been able to make the electric commuter-car thing work particularly well (witness Corbin Motors and the Saturn EV-1). Success in this market is definitely a mixture of pricing and performance (and not getting generally screwed by business partners). Hopefully these guys will fare better.

“Why not Hybrids?”, you may be asking. To my mind here are a few problems with hybrids when compared to pure-electric:

  • No HOV lane access in CA for Hybrids.
  • More expensive to operate
  • Much higher maintenance (all the problems/maintenance of a gas-engine coupled with the life-span of a battery)
  • More expensive to development/manufacture (tho’ both electric and hybrids have this problem right now, the hybrids substantially more complicated powerplant setup should always be more expensive to develop manufacture than either pure gas or electric systems)

    • Found them via John Robb’s Weblog. I’d bet Alex thinks they’re ugly…

    Written by jthurber

    August 14th, 2003 at 2:39 pm

    Posted in General

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