An example of a Low Speed Vehicle

Electric cars have labored under the impression that they’re too slow, and an enormous percentage of the population still believe this to be the case.

The truth is, an electric car’s top speed is not limited in any mechanical way. In fact in 1898 Count Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat set the world’s first official land-speed record near Paris in an electric car, reaching an unheard-of 39 mph (62 km/h). This record was short lived, being beaten by another, even faster electric car a few days later.

Today, electric cars like the Buckeye Bullet have been recorded reaching speeds of over 300 mph (482 km/h) on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, USA.

So with speed clearly not an issue, how did electric cars achieve a reputation as being slow, lethargic vehicles? What went wrong?

Several things to be exact, but perhaps one of the largest reasons is that over the last few decades large auto makers haven’t been interested in making electric cars. This means that little companies with little budgets and typical blokes in sheds have been picking up the slack and building them instead. The resulting top speeds of these electric vehicles have often been poor, yet the vehicles still tend to get media attention – for better or worse.

The availability of parts and the cost of quality batteries has always been an issue for anyone building an electric car. To cut costs these small manufacturers sacrificed areas of their EVs by building smaller cars which needed fewer batteries and lower voltages. The downside was that these cars were often tiny, looked unusual, and to top it all off had very low top speeds. The result was that almost every company making these low speed electric vehicles didn’t survive longer than a decade – yet their legacy of lackluster electric vehicle performance lives on. The result is that people still believe electric cars are inherently slow and there’s nothing that can be done about it.

Another reason some small car makers insist on building slow electric vehicles is to avoid putting their vehicles through crash testing – an incredibly costly exercise. If you have a company that builds cars capable of highway speeds, then you’ll need to crash test them before you can sell them. A batch of crash tests typically costs the average car builder around $1m USD – a crippling amount of money for a small manufacturer.

The easy way around this is to not build cars designed for the highway, but build LSV (Low Speed Vehicles) instead, and sell them as suitable for retirement villages and college campuses. It’s a catch-22 as you can imagine: No crash testing means enormous savings; but sales are restricted to a tiny – and already clogged – market.

Thankfully many large auto makers are slowly rising from their 50+ year slumber and are making plans to build highway-capable electric cars in the future. Analysts predict that in 2020 approximately 10% of all new car sales will be electric. Sadly these electric cars are predicted to be priced too high for the common car buyer, so many will be forced to do electric car conversions instead.