The Zenn Motor company is a Canadian company that was producing a NEV (neighborhood electric vehicle.) A nev is typically a small, light, often open, electric vehicle similar to what you might see around a golf course, hotels, a campus or a corporation. There has been some push to market them for private use in enclosed communities and due to recent NEV laws use them on roads where the speed limit is less than 35mph.

The Zenn NEV is an enclosed vehicle, but shares with others far less demanding road worthy tests. The Zenn NEV was a vehicle prepared for the later insertion of an Eesu (electrical energy storage unit) made by EEStor a privately held Texas Company. Presumably with the better power source the NEV could be upgraded to a fully road worthy vehicle. Zenn has private sources of information and based upon the information it has received it has bought about a 10% stake in EEStor and has exclusive rights to market the Eesu in 4 wheeled vehicles.

But more recently it has decided to shift its goal from producing vehicles to just preparing a power train based upon the Eesu. This would be marketed to other manufacturers of electric vehicles. And most importantly to your question, this makes any vehicle produced by Zenn Motors an orphan.

Between being a less substantial car with presumably a lower lifetime and a vehicle that is being abandoned by its manufacturer I wonder about it’s life expectancy. Our environment has seen other examples of a throw away technology with bottles, cans, plastic bags. Useful life expectancy has a clear impact on how many will have to be produced and how often they will be replaced. In general an electric vehicle with it’s few moving parts might be expected to last a very long time. Energy and environmental costs can then be amortized over a longer period. This may be less so with a Nev and a vehicle with less support.

The countering argument is that NEV use is an alternative to using a less environmentally friendly vehicle. If the vehicle is operated at lower speeds and less frequently if may still last a long time and avoid an energy and environmental cost of replacement.

In general, any electric vehicle is going to be operationally better for the environment than using an equally sized ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicle simply because it may be up to 5 times more efficient and produces no operational pollution.

Any new car has a significant environmental impact in it’s construction. An electric vehicle more so because there’s a lot more materials involved when considering the batteries. Of course, from an operational perspective, they are very economic to operate and produce no pollution themselves hence are at best carbon neutral.

However, if instead of replacing the nearly one billion vehicles on the roads today, we focused our efforts on how we make fuel, we could make gasoline and diesel by gasification/pyrolysis of biomass with biochar charcoal sequestration. This means that without having to replace any cars, we could change our gasoline from a net carbon source to a carbon sink and then our gas guzzling friends would actually be paying to clean up the environment.

Of course, I would personally like to have an electric car as the operating costs is about 5 cents a mile whereas the operating costs of a gasoline powered automobile is about 15 cents per mile but I would like it if our gas guzzling SUV owners who are so entrenched in their smoky behemoths continue to pay the 15 cents plus per mile except with that money actually removing carbon from the atmosphere.

So what’s best for the environment is if everybody else continues to pay through the nose to run their gasoline powered cars on carbon negative synthetic fuels and for me to have an inexpensive electric vehicle. Do as I say, not as I do…

yes. its good for us,our environment and our planet