If the right conditions are met, this one-seat electric vehicle is your dream car.
The all-new SOLO, manufactured by Vancouver-based Electra Meccanica, is ideal for anyone who doesn’t own a pet, have children, a significant other, a daily commute longer than 50 miles each way and whose surrounding roads are well-maintained and free of hotheads and the oblivious. You will magically create parking spaces where Yukons and F-150s wouldn’t even try. The good cheer and “awww!” extended to this vehicle by both pedestrians and motorists was akin to the sort of reception one gets with a supercar; dozens smiled and snapped during our test last week at CES.
Power is supplied via a 16.1 kWh lithium-ion battery pack mounted beneath the SOLO’s floor. Charging from takes about 3 hours at 220 volts, 6 hours at 110. There’s 10 cubic feet of storage between its front and rear trunks; Bluetooth connectivity via a single-DIN car stereo, a reversing camera that shares a display with the digital instrument cluster and heated seats all come with.
It should also come with its own clown nose, and customized Barney badging. It’s not so much a car as a 3/4 dinosaur egg with three wheels and an electric motor.
The SOLO’s (standard) steering is stiff; its (disc) brakes weak, it’s loud inside and you feel every road divot in your sacroliliac. It does not carry nor is it required to carry airbags, so if you hit something or something bigger than a motorcycle hits you, sucks to be ya’ll.
This may still be your ride by sight alone, and we’re not the only ones who think so; parent company ElectraMeccanica Vehicles Corp. (OTCQB: ECCTF) announced a manufacturing agreement late last year with Zongshen Industrial Group Co., Ltd to produce 75,000 SOLO all-electric vehicles over the next three years. Specifically, the plan calls for the production of 5,000 SOLOs in 2018; 20,000 in 2019; and 50,000 in 2020. Our tester was but #24 in the world.
We’d like this car for a year, or at least for a week, as we usually do here. We’d like to take the SOLO through the mountains, into the guts of a major city, we’d like to beat it up, we’d like to try and make it skid on a closed course and see how we fare steering out of it. We’d also like to run it into a brick wall at its stated top speed of around 80 MPH with a crash test dummy up front, and see what the dummy has to say afterward. In other words, we’d like to treat it like any other vehicle and see if it maintains its integrity.
Absent that, SOLO is selling a lower-priced product that doesn’t pretend to be better, faster or safer than it is, and you don’t require it to.
