streetlegal

I’m not sure if you could really call it a legit SUV, but these fun-looking little Chinese electric vehicles might just be an interesting alternative to the car bloat clogging the streets of cities around the world. Oh, and they make an excellent entry for this week’s Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week. I stumbled across these $2,600 gems while perusing Alibaba, and one of the first things to catch my eye was the “street-legal” moniker in the title. Based on several years spent…

California-based Scarbo Vintage revealed the SV Rover, an ultra-rugged off-road monster of a vehicle. Dubbed the “world’s first street-legal hypertruck,” the SV Rover packs over 1,000 hp in all-electric form. Meet the new SV Rover electric Hypertruck Scarbo unveiled the SV Rover after 14 years of design and development. The California-based auto design and manufacturing firm is “pushing the boundaries” of performance with vehicles inspired by iconic designs. The Rover is the third vehicle from…

In Part 1 of this series titled “Everything you need to know about electric micro-cars, NEVs, LSVs, & golf carts,” we discussed the various categories of micro-cars, neighborhood electric vehicles (NEVs), low-speed vehicles (LSVs), and golf carts. We also covered how these vehicles are becoming such popular car alternatives for so many people. Now in Part 2, we’ll dive into the important topic of what makes these vehicles street-legal for use on public roads. As we discussed in Part 1 of…

The AYRO Vanish has grabbed headlines over the past year as it rolls ever closer to production at AYRO’s Texas factory. Now the electric mini-truck’s final step ahead of manufacturing has begun as the Vanish starts street-legal homologation. The AYRO Vanish is an electric utility vehicle that is designed to fit into the low-speed vehicle (LSV) federal designation. The mini-truck uses a lightweight architecture to limit the entire vehicle weight and maximize the allowable payload. The…

One of the most gloriously silly projects in the automotive world is set to launch within the next few months. The Tamiya Wild One Max is a faithful replica of a hugely popular R/C toy from the '80s, upscaled to a two-seat, street-legal electric buggy.Obviously this runs completely backwards compared to how things normally go; plenty of real-world dream cars have been miniaturized for kids to play with, but we're not aware of any other project designed to bring a car designed first and foremost as a kids' toy up to full…

Electric microcars are a tricky to define subset of motor vehicles, especially in the US. Open-air neighborhood electric vehicles, fancy golf carts, and other small vehicles tend to blur the line, leaving microcars in that weird category of “I know it when I see it.” Now after recently test-driving one myself from the New York-based startup Wink Motors, now I definitely know it. There are a few different street-legal microcar-style EVs in the US, but most take the form of golf cart-style buggies.…

Yank Ducati's new Panigale V4 R out of its crate, replace the purely ornamental standard exhaust with a titanium Akrapovic race pipe and fill it up with a fancy "performance oil" from Shell, and you're sitting on a machine capable of 240.5 horsepower.Already one of the most powerful production motorcycles in all of Christendom, the Panigale ascends to new heights of lunacy in its latest and greatest incarnation. In standard form, fully street-legal and ready to pass any pesky Euro 5 emissions tests you may run into on the…

Remember that fun little Jeep-lookin’ Mini Moke from a WWII British military vehicle development program? It’s been rehashed in several incarnations since, but the most recent (and most stateside) is Moke America, which wants to get Americans to switch from big gas guzzlers to fun little open-top electric cars. The only catch is that these aren’t really electric cars. Oh, they’re electric alright. They just aren’t “cars”, at least not in the traditional sense. They fit into what’s known as a Low Speed Vehicle…