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Hello and welcome to the vergecast, the flagship podcast of Quadricycles. I'm your friend David Pearce, and today on the show, we're gonna talk about EVs, but not EVs like we normally talk about EVs. There's this new kind of burgeoning trend of these cars that are essentially golf carts that are trying to become everybody's second vehicle. Sure, own your pickup, own your giant suv, but maybe instead of buying a second car, you might buy one of these. It's a new kind of car, it's a new kind of electric car. And I think there's something big happening here. Verge's Andy Hawkins is going to come on and talk about it. We'll get right to that. But first, here's everything else happening on the Verge today. This is 90 seconds on the verge for Tuesday, July 21, 2026. Lite, the company that you might have heard of that's made minimalist phones over the last decade or so, announced its first flip phone, the Lite Flip. It's roughly what you think. It's a light phone in flip phone form. But I keep thinking about one thing. Light's co founder told me that they made a flip phone specifically because people actively didn't want to be seen using a smartphone. Something big is changing in our relationship with technology, and this phone is right out in front of it. I'm gonna buy one of these, and then I'm gonna buy whatever insanely expensive, foldable Samsung launches tomorrow and just live in full on phone extremes. I'm very excited about it. Meanwhile, a judge officially approved a settlement that will see Anthropic pay $1.5 billion to a group of authors who accused it of using more than 7 million of their books to train AI models. That is a big number, obviously, but there's a bigger. There are a lot of copyright lawsuits out there just like this one, accusing AI companies of stealing data to train LLMs. This one is a settlement, not a guilty verdict. And the specifics of the case are actually kind of messy. It's about how the books were copied and stored, not that they were used specifically in LLMs, but it still sets a high price for settlement, and it sets an important precedent for all of those other suits and the many, many, many ones still to come. Finally, the Verge is Justine Kalma has a big story out today about the real environmental cost of data centers, or even of one. I feel like it's often hard to understand how much energy, water and other resources are being gobbled up by the AI industry, but also by our technology everywhere, including, like the phone in our pockets. You should check it out and see what it really costs. You can see more on all of this@theverge.com that's 90 seconds. On the Verge for Tuesday, July 21st.
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EVs that aren't exactly cars. Joining me now, Andy Hawkins, the Virtus transportation editor. Hello, sir. Hello. So I want to get into sort of the big picture stuff going on here, but I want you to start by telling me just sort of the story of this new company called Chip Motors that you've been, you've been writing about. So let's start there. Tell me who Chip Motors is and kind of what they're up to.
D
Yeah, so they're a Miami based startup. I was just talking to the CEO the other day and he talked about how, you know, he's been like in the tech sector for a long time and he sold a camera company to like a scooter operator in Europe and had some money to play around with. So he was interested in sentence. I know, right. And he's been very interested in the idea of like, right, sizing American cars because it seems like everybody has to buy big trucks and SUVs for sort of every kind of use case that you can imagine. And he thinks that that's not really the right idea. And he's been sort of paying attention to this kind of like quiet, underreported growth in like golf cart sales. Because if you look at like microcars, specifically like tiny little cars like Microlina and Fiat, those aren't doing too well in the U.S. but golf carts, low speed 25 capped at 25 miles per hour, are actually selling at increasingly higher and higher rates. You're seeing especially in these like warm weather markets like in Florida and the Sun Belt, where people are using them as second cars.
B
Right.
D
They still have like the escalades and the F150s in their, in their driveways. But then they use these golf carts specifically for short trips, grocery trips, dropping the kids off at school, taking them to the park, soccer practice, what have you. And so his idea was, okay, why we don't have to just rely on these ugly sort of defeatured golf carts for everything. There needs to be some sort of middle ground between the F150s and the Golf carts. And so his idea was Chip, which is a very small, capped at 25 miles per hour. Sort of looks like a Jeep Wrangler got hit by a shrink ray. It's a little bit boxier. It does. That's a really good description. It's taller than your average golf cart, has like a tall windshield, can seat four, can be specked out to seat six actually, but no doors on it, and isn't sort of subject to the same regulatory requirements that most vehicles would be, which is like, this is kind of like, kind of, I feel like is at the center of all this is this sort of regulatory loophole which we could talk about in a second. But his idea was let's give him something fun, give him something quirky. Obviously it's going to have like self driving operations and AI integration and all of that that, you know, everything has to have in this cursed year that we live in. But I do think that the idea gets at something that is original and interesting, which is that, you know, people are looking for second cars that aren't actually cars. And this kind of like seems to serve that market.
A
Yeah, there's a trend happening here that I feel like we're literally sort of at the point now where a three is a trend. Right. You, you covered this company called Ambul, which I think is based in Portugal, that is building something very similar. Maybe the single raddest looking golf cart I've ever seen.
D
Oh yeah. It's like, it's so sick if the
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other one is like a Jeep Wrangler hit with a shrink ray. This is like a golf cart From Mad Max Fury Road. And I mean that in the best possible way, like it rules. And then there's the, the Fiat Topolino, which is this another sort of tiny little adorable guy designed to be on the streets. So what is sparking this trend? Like why, why is this happening right now do you think?
D
I think that a lot of people are going to shop for second cars and are finding themselves unsatisfied with their options because there has been this long gestating trend shift away from sedans. There's also obviously we have this affordability crisis going on in the auto market today where prices, average transaction prices have been steadily increasing pretty much on a hyperscale since the pandemic, where now they're sitting somewhere around the 50,000 doll range for the average price of just whatever car you want to buy. There are just no cheap cars available anymore. Many outlets have covered this phenomenon. And so I think people are going to their dealers and coming away dissatisfied with their options. They don't want to spend that much money on something which they see as a second vehicle and so they're looking for something else. And I think these companies, some of these startups, they have different business models, they have different ideas of how to different kind of customers that they're thinking about, but they are all centered around the idea of what if you don't have to buy a giant four door SUV or truck? What if you can have something that's smaller and fits a little bit better with the types of trips that you're trying to take. And then I think as a side of that there's also sort of electrification, the rise in popularity of E bikes and sort of how all of that is converging with people looking for alternate transportation methods.
A
The idea of having this both as the, you know, drive to the grocery store car and as the one the kid can take. That is it's sort of the dumb phone version of a car. And I mean that as a compliment. It is, it is, it's safer, it's simpler, it's less complicated to manage and maintain. It is, it is a thing you can feel much more comfortable turning your kid loose with. I find very exciting. We've tried this in the US many times. I like going way back. I have been thinking about and a proponent of all of these various last mile solutions for forever right. We talk all the time about how most trips are short and your giant Ford F150 is massively overkill for the two mile drives that most of us do most of the time. And yet, especially here in the US none of it has really happened. More people are biking than ever. This is your chance, if you'd like to, to once again extol the virtues of a cargo bike. But all that is well and good. And yet, at least as far as I can tell, we are still as much a big car economy as anything. So I guess next to all of that, how would you handicap the possibility of these as a real mainstream phenomenon in the United States, which is very different from a lot of the other places that we're talking about here?
D
Yeah, I think that there's absolutely still a long road to travel. There's, and it's very much uphill, which I think a lot of these vehicles would struggle with because of their torque capabilities. But at the same time, as long
A
as it's a gentle hill, we'll be okay.
D
It's a slope, you know, a gentle slope. But no, I, I do think that we're starting to see some examples of, you know, some market penetration. I think. You know, I mentioned how in Europe teenagers are, are, are, are driving some of these vehicles. Here in the US I think what we're starting to see, some of these Sunbelt communities, Florida and elsewhere, you go to some of the high schools and you'll see just like golf carts in the parking lot as opposed to traditional vehicles. Like the teenagers are driving them to and from school, they're driving them to football practice, they're driving them to the beach.
A
Six year old me would have been so pumped to drive a golf cart everywhere. Like truly this is such a victory of an idea for teenagers. I mean like so into it.
D
It is kind of like the solution. I mean everyone's sort of like tearing their hair out about this like emoto problem with teenagers especially, right. They're driving these sort of like very powerful, very fast electric motorbikes. And a lot of states are starting to crack down on that. They're getting kind of freaked out. I think the solution is these sort of like more golf cart style vehicles, these low speed electric vehicles that can cap out at 25 miles per hour. Right. They're not legal everywhere. They're only supposed to be driven on roads where this posted speed limit is 35 miles per hour. But that said, it is, I think it's starting to emerge. You can see these communities are seeing this as a solution. But that's not everywhere, right? That's warm weather communities, beach style communities. It's not going to be the same for a dense place like New York city or Washington. D.C. or elsewhere. But I talked to these guys from Amble and from Chip and they're talking about ways that they see they could start to squeeze in. They see the phenomenon potentially spreading to more and more communities. It might not be the right fit for everywhere, but I do think that they're optimistic about the long term prospects.
A
Okay, what is the regulatory environment here in that front in the US and maybe the answer is this is new enough that no one quite knows. But you have trained me over the years to understand that a big part of what is happening with EVs in general, broadly defined, is as much a regulatory problem as it is a technology problem. What is going on with these things in terms of what it will take to get them up and running in sort of a mainstream way in the United States?
D
Well, I think that's why some of these companies are as optimistic as they are, because they see the regulatory sort of threshold as being a lot lower than it is for your average vehicle, even your average electric vehicle. So a lot of these vehicles, Chip and Amble and others, would qualify as low speed electric vehicles under the federal motor safety standards. And basically that means they don't have to have all the things that your traditional car has to have. They don't have to have airbags, crumple zones, anti lock brakes, advanced driver assist systems, backup cameras, all of these things because they have these extreme limitations, right? They're capped at 25 miles per hour. And that's basically all they basically have to have are headlights, tail lights, a turn signal, rear view mirrors, side mirrors, parking brakes and seat belts.
A
Interesting.
D
That's it. And so I think it's not a long list. It's not.
A
That's easy.
D
And so I talked to the CEO from Chip Motors. He's like, it's basically two pages of regulations. So I think that that's why they think that they have maybe a little bit more breathing room in terms of who they can market these vehicles to. And also they can play around with the design, right? Like you see with Amble hiring designers from Apple to build this very gorgeous looking open air buggy with like nice materials and things like that, because all they have to do is sort of follow this, this very short list of regulations. So I think it's an interesting sort of gray area that these vehicles sort of find themselves in that's sort of leading to some of the excitement around them.
A
Are they also, as a result, much easier to manufacture? Again, the other thing you've trained me in is that, boy, is it hard to build cars. And boy, do most companies fall apart before they figure out how to. I would assume, just looking at these things, that they must be much easier to actually build and that that might be a huge boon for these companies trying to pull this off.
D
Yeah, I think so. I think that that is the assumption. I think we still have to wait and see. A lot of these companies are still very new. And for more established automakers like Fiat, which is bringing the Topolino, the $15,000 Topolino, back to America, you know, they have obviously the margins to absorb any losses that they might experience there. But, yeah, I think they're going to be using contract manufact. Maybe they'll assemble it here in the US but they'll be getting off the shelf parts for a lot of this kind of stuff. And I think a lot of the innovation will come through the design and how sort of they differentiate themselves from your typical golf cart. In Chip's example, it's designing something that kind of looks like a Jeep Wrangler, but also has sort of like a spacious frunk for groceries and a big LED screen on the front bumper with kind of like winking digital eyes that could kind of give it like a kind of a quirky personality. Yeah.
A
There's a picture on their website that it looks like it's doing sort of a half smile in a way that is. I can't. I can't tell if I would grow to hate this after about two weeks of seeing it or if it is genuinely the most adorable thing I've ever seen in a car.
D
Yeah, I don't know if there. If there's necessarily a market for that. That, to me, is a little bit less interesting overall than the idea of there being an actual viable market in the US for these vehicles. You can slap your agentic AI and your remote parking, you know, features on it. That's fine. I. That that's a way to differentiate yourself from the competition. I think the real question is, do people want these vehicles? Are they going to buy them? And if so, how are they going to use them?
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Hire the right pro today. So if this works, it seems like there is a huge set of stuff you could in theory do along these same lines, right? I think back to the early days of self driving when the question was, are we going to end up completely redesigning the car as a result? And you look at like a Zoox, which invented a very different looking thing to carry you around based fully on self driving. I think in general, self driving is probably too new and we just haven't pushed all the way down that road. But it strikes me as this being another huge possibility for that, that if indeed these folks are right, that there is space here for something that is deliberately slower, that is substantially simpler and smaller, that this might be another chance to kind of reinvent the idea of what these are supposed to be. Is your sense that these companies are thinking about that? I mean, all of these, like you said, everybody calls them golf carts because they functionally look like golf carts. Do you think that's where this lands or is there some potential for weirdness and innovation here?
D
I'm hopeful that there's potential for weirdness and innovation because that's, that's our, that's where the Verge operates, right? That's, that's true.
A
That's where the fun is.
D
That's where we live. And I, I, I do think that there is going to need to be some sort of like, psychological shift in the American mindset towards how they shop for cars and what they buy. And I think that which car companies
A
have been trying to make happen for decades and with very little success.
D
Very little success, Exactly. And we're starting to see that now with sort of a lot of the reversals that we're seeing in the electric vehicle market. That said, there is still an electric vehicle market. It still exists. People are still buying these cars. Tesla's having, you know, a little bit of a resurgence and, you know, I think things are starting to stabilize in that market. That said, I do think that we need to sort of Wrap our heads around why it is we've allowed the auto industry to convince us for so long that we need an F150 just to go to the grocery store for like five bags of groceries.
C
Right.
D
It's not, it's not necessary when you live in the suburbs to have this giant hulking SUV that doesn't even, or truck that doesn't even really fit in your garage that was built in maybe like the 1950s. So it is kind of like this idea of like. Right. Sizing our transportation needs. And I think that it's going to be a tall ask. I, I just, I, you know, we're such a big company country, we're so spread out. It's much different value proposition than it is in Europe, which is denser and closer together. The cities and the communities are much closer together and we just have all of this wide open space. So there is going to always be people who want big vehicles that can take them long distances. The question is, I think in that second vehicle market is where I think you're going to start to see a lot of this weirdness and innovation. Is it an E bike, is it a quadricycle, Is it a golf cart? Or is it just another smaller Toyota RAV4 or Honda CR V or whatever? So I think that that's going to be sort of the challenge. Right. They're not going to be maybe necessarily competing against your escalades and your F150s. They're going to be competing against your Kias and your Hyundais and your sort of more compact vehicles that are kind of serving, have been traditionally serving those needs. And whether or not people are going to be willing to downsize from those compact vehic.
A
Yeah. I have to say that actually makes me feel slightly more optimistic about these things chances because again, what we've learned over and over is that you will not unseat the giant pickup trucks. They will get ever more giant, they will get ever more expensive and they will keep selling. And that, that is, that is just where we are. But it does seem like everything else is kind of gettable at this point. Like the, the idea of building the sort of cheap sedan seems to just get harder and harder, especially in an EV world when people have range anxiety and are worried about what these things cost. And so if you can come in and say, well, we have. And this is to some extent the same pitch for the slate truck, right?
D
Yeah, exactly.
A
We do less. But you don't need a car that does everything like that feels like when you're coming in as sort of the second complimentary vehicle. An actually really compelling case to be like, you have a car that does all this other stuff. We are going to be really perfectly tuned to a much smaller set of things. And by the way, we cost one third of what that other one cost costs. And it just feels like maybe that space is more open than we realize. I have no idea how good a business that space is. Right. That has tended to be lower margin and a very different kind of customer than a lot of these other car companies are looking for. But it does seem like the logic of that market has been the same for a very long time and no one has cracked it in some time. And especially with EVs, especially if you can have, you can solve people's range anxiety by saying, look, you're only going to take this thing 25 miles an hour and you're only going to drive it a few miles at a time. So the idea of running out of power in the middle of a highway in Idaho is non existent because it's not going to happen.
D
Yeah.
A
So I don't know, there's something about that that seems right to me, but that same thing has felt right to me for a very long time and no one has quite cracked it yet. So I'm both optimistic and pessimistic.
D
And something I brought up to the CEO of CHIP was that, you know, it's not like there, there aren't any subcomm cap subcompact cars. We have Honda fits, we have Nissan versus we have, you know, Mini Coopers and what have you. And they could drive in the highway. Right. They can go over 25 miles per hour. And he, his, his response was that, you know, a lot of these are European spec cars, you know, and they're sort of made for European driving and maybe they found like a, a market here in the US but this is a car that we're building for the US and what he cited was, I thought was really interesting was that there are these communities in Florida and elsewhere that have started to build infrastructure for these cars. Right. There are golf cart specific roads that connect schools and communities and parks and things like that that are kind of bike lanes and also used by some of these low speed vehicles as well. The fact that that doesn't exist nationwide. Right. These are sort of very highly specific to some of these warm weather communities and you're not really seeing that same kind of diversity and emphas structure in a lot of these other communities across the country, which I think is maybe going to be some of the limitations that some of these companies run into as well. If we want to see more micro, you know, sort of like form factors, we're also going to need to sort of shrink down our expectations around our roads and our infrastructure as well.
A
Totally. Do you think these companies are also thinking about a robo taxi or even just ride sharing future here? I mean you talk about these golf cart communities, you can pretty easily imagine the world in which these become useful. Simple, relatively low cost ways to move people around. Like, and again, a lot of the last mile things people talk about are things like college campuses and these, these relatively dense, relatively contained communities. These things strike me as perfect for those. Is that part of the plan here?
D
Yeah. So the chip CEO spoke specifically about this. He's like, as autonomy gets better and better and more and more people are going to be relying on shared autonomous vehicles, whether they're robo taxis or shuttles or whatever it is, he can see this as being something that graduates from being your second vehicle to perhaps your primary vehicle and the only one that you actually own because it does maybe fit more in the use cases that they see it where you're taking your kids to school and all this kind of stuff. You don't want to necessarily have to pay a subscription or what have you or affair for robo taxis. But then maybe when you get home you can summon the robo taxi to take you to work or what have you. So I do think that they're trying, and he's trying to factor that into the actual feature technology that is being embedded in this car right now. It's a teleoperated remote assistance system where they have remote operators who will park the car for you. I haven't really seen that work at scale, so that's something I'm a little bit more skeptical about than some of the other ideas that he's proposing. But he says that eventually they'll have some sort of autonomy feature level four, fully driverless, that you can just summon the car to you when you want it, send it to go park itself, it'll drive you to where you need to go. And because again, you're dealing with something that is more lower speed and has these sort of guardrails, it becomes sort of a very much maybe a better proposition for autonomy because you don't have to worry about going on the highway, you don't have to worry about going 70 miles per hour. And when speed is not sort of like the end of everything, then it sort of Opens you up to sort of some more technological innovation.
A
I think this all sounds so good, Andy. This is the thing. Okay, before I let you go here, I need you to accurately calibrate my enthusiasm here because I look at something like the chip or like the amble one and it actually fits perfectly into my day to day life. Right? We, we have, we have a Hyundai SUV for when we need to go visit family or when we want to go far. But most of my driving most of the time is a mile and a half to my son's daycare and then six blocks to my other son's preschool and then about a mile to the coffee shop and then home. And that's. I do that circle twice a day, every day, all week. And that, that plus the grocery store accounts for most of my driving. That isn't, you know, it's trips like that. I, I have always struggled with the E bike thing because that's a little tricky, especially when, when I have kids. Like, just how do I get my kids on there to take the weather
D
being what it is?
A
The weather is what it is. My wife gets very nervous about biking around cars, all these things. This seems perfect. And I'm like, I, I would, I would. Next time we need a second car, maybe I ditch the, the hybrid sedan that we have and buy a golf cart and that becomes the future. So I need you, I need you to tell me right now whether I should genuinely earnestly get my hopes up about this being a thing or if I need to pull back a little bit.
D
I think that the only, the only limitations I can see are, you know, sort of the, the, the road diversity in your community. Right. Like you're going to be on roads, it sounds like, like that potentially are 40 mph roads or 50 mile per hour roads. If, if you.
A
I think there is a 40 between here and there.
D
I mean, like, if they're, if it's exclusively all 35 miles per hour. I do think it is about like this psychological barrier that we all have where like, yeah, you live in, it's a 25 mile per hour road, but you're really going 30. Or it's a 35 mile per hour road, but you'RE really going 40. It's this idea that like, we're always pushing the barrier a little bit. Right. And I do think that that is, it's not just a psychological thing. I think it's also a market limitation as well. So I think if we can break free of these mental bonds that we have around speed and quickness and getting to where we go as fast as possible all the time and just maybe enjoy the ride a little bit more. Then I think the world opens wide open.
A
From your mouth to the ears of everyone who drives near me all the time. I'll take it.
D
Oh, it's, it's, it's, it's always other drivers, right, David?
A
Well, yeah, I go just a perfectly rational speed all the time. I'm imagining myself at 25 miles an hour on our road, just causing a ruckus every single morning.
D
I think I'm ready for that. It's gonna be great, too. Let's do it.
A
All right, Andy, good to see you, buddy. Thanks for being here.
D
Same here, man. Thank you.
A
All right, that's it for the show. Thank you to Andy for being here, and thank you, as always, for watching and listening. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, if you see one of these on the street, take a picture of it it send it to me. Vergecastofthe verge.com is the email. The hotline is 866-verge11. I want to hear all of your thoughts. If you want to take me for a ride, also in your street Legal rad golf cart, get at me. I'm ready for it. As a reminder, the best thing you can do to support all of this and to one day fund my own golf cart ambitions, is to subscribe to the Verge. Theverge.com subscribe it gets you all of our podcasts ad free, including this one. It gets you all of our newsletters. It gets you all of our content, coverage of this space and everything else. Theverge.com subscribe thanks in advance. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This episode is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kefer, and Travis Larchuk. We'll see you next time. Rock and roll.
The Vergecast
Episode: "The Car of the Future is an EV Golf Cart"
Date: July 21, 2026
Host: David Pierce
Guest: Andy Hawkins, Transportation Editor at The Verge
This episode explores the emerging trend of small, low-speed electric vehicles—essentially high-tech, street-legal golf carts—positioned as affordable, practical second cars for Americans. Host David Pierce and transportation editor Andy Hawkins examine the business models, cultural forces, regulatory environments, and future potential of these “right-sized” EVs. The conversation focuses on startup Chip Motors, Portugal's Amble, and Fiat’s Topolino, looking at why these quirky vehicles might finally succeed in the American market.
[03:45–07:30]
“He thinks that... buying big trucks and SUVs for every kind of use case... is not really the right idea.” (Andy, 04:09)
[07:30–08:59]
[08:59–12:21]
The U.S. driving culture still clings to large vehicles; “we are still as much a big car economy as anything.”
Adoption so far is regionally specific: Sun Belt/high school parking lots in Florida fill up with golf carts instead of traditional teen cars.
Regulatory/legal availability is limited: only legal on roads posted up to 35mph.
Teen Safety: Many states are cracking down on fast e-motorbikes for teens—a “golf cart” solution squares needs for affordable, safe, slow, fun teen rides.
"I think the solution is these... more golf cart style vehicles... capped at 25 miles per hour." (Andy, 11:16)
[12:21–14:52]
"It's basically two pages of regulations." (Andy, 13:47)
[14:33–16:28]
[20:16–23:41]
[26:55–29:11]
“As autonomy gets better... more people are going to be relying on shared autonomous vehicles... he can see this as being something that graduates from being your second vehicle to... your primary vehicle…” (Andy, 27:25)
“It sort of looks like a Jeep Wrangler got hit by a shrink ray.”
(Andy Hawkins, 05:14)
“It’s basically two pages of regulations.”
(Andy, 13:47)
“We need to... wrap our heads around why it is we’ve allowed the auto industry to convince us... we need an F150 just to go to the grocery store for like five bags of groceries.”
(Andy, 22:18)
“It’s sort of the dumb phone version of a car. And I mean that as a compliment… It’s safer, it’s simpler, it’s less complicated to manage and maintain.”
(David Pierce, 08:59)
“We are still as much a big car economy as anything… More people are biking than ever. This is your chance, if you’d like to, to once again extol the virtues of a cargo bike.”
(David, 08:59)
The episode is lively, curious, and just a bit skeptical but ultimately optimistic about the quirky world of slow, small, electric “cars” for short trips. David and Andy blend journalism with banter, poking gentle fun at U.S. car culture while sincerely exploring whether American habits and infrastructure can finally shift. Andy’s final words:
“If we can break free of these mental bonds that we have around speed and quickness and getting to where we go as fast as possible all the time and just maybe enjoy the ride a little bit more. Then I think the world opens wide open.” (30:33)
For listeners considering an EV golf cart as a second car:
It’s an idea whose time might finally be coming—if infrastructure, psychology, and regulatory quirks all line up. The future could be smaller, slower, and a lot more fun.