People occasionally ask me how long I’ve been hanging around electric cars. The followup question usually is, “What’s the first electric car you ever drove?”
The answers: Since before you were born (in most cases). And the CitiCar.
That would be around 1975, not long after a Florida startup, Sebring-Vanguard, started producing a handful of tiny, wedge-shaped, two-passenger, battery-powered “cars.”
They looked like big doorstops built on top of golf carts — and felt about as safe as a Radio Flyer wagon on a freeway.
There was a catch: You couldn’t take the CitiCar on a freeway. It had a top speed of about 25 miles per hour. Zero-25 acceleration? Don’t mention it.
Ironically, I owned an American Motors Gremlin at the time. Compared to the CitiCar, the Gremlin looked and drove like a sports car.
It would be decades before I drove another electric car. As luck would have it, it was a dual-motor Tesla Model S. It was the antithesis of the Sebring-Vanguard CitiCar in every imaginable way. Not the least of which, you might actually want to own and drive one.
I’m still waiting to see what Franz von Holzhausen’s “baby” Tesla looks like. Perhaps if you crossed a Cybertruck with a CitiCar . . .
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