Electrek.co
by Micah Toll
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.”
There are a few different street-legal microcar-style EVs in the US, but most take the form of golf cart-style buggies.
Some are even actual golf carts that have been souped up with the required hardware to make them street legal.
That leaves Wink as pretty much the only low-cost, car-like, and street-legal microcar in the US, at least for now.
What is a microcar? To be more precise, these types of tiny electric vehicles aren’t actually “cars” in a legal sense. They’re street-legal motor vehicles in the US, but they actually fit into a different category in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s motor vehicle designations.
It’s a classification known as low-speed vehicles (LSVs), which have a reduced number of regulatory requirements compared to highway-capable cars.
They are permitted to travel at speeds of up to 25 mph (40 km/h), and can travel on roads with posted speed limits up to 35 mph (56 km/h), provided they meet a shorter list of safety and manufacturing regulations.