The Nissan Leaf is a fine car and I don’t like when people denigrate what has been a sincere effort to get people to accept electric cars as mainstream. The same goes for the Chevy Volt/Bolt. Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, we can make one clear determination: Tesla’s biggest success was not a technological one but a physiological one. Electric cars offer many packaging and platform advantages, which means you can make them different. Specifically, they can be fun. They should be fun. Look at this thing.
This is the ACE Alpha Wolf. It’s just a render from a company that may never actually make or sell a car. All of their renders are fun. Look at this thing. That’s fun. The Alpha Wolf is a truck and I’m not even going to get into range (they say 275 miles) or too far down the rabbit hole of features until they build a bunch of these and, frankly, unless I had a lot of money to burn this wouldn’t be the first place I’d drop a deposit.
But ACE has the right idea. This Marty McFly-like just needs to be black with yellow lights above the roof and it’s perfect.
Widespread acceptance of electric vehicles is coming, but the effort to make electric cars as good as ICE-powered cars is fucked from the jump. Electric cars shouldn’t be as good as gas-powered ones. They should be better. They can be better. Eliminating so many of the drivetrain components means you can do almost whatever you want. So do whatever you want!
ACE isn’t alone here. Look at this weird truck/camper thing from Canoo:
That’s fun. That’s real fun.
The bigger players are starting to get this. GMC has the new EV Hummer and Ford is doing this:
More of this please. Make EVs Fun. Make them ridiculous. Make them shooting brakes. Make them Brubaker Boxes. Let people take trains to work and then have a silly little EV for errands and the good times.