GreenEmotor electric scooters
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GreenEmotor electric scooters
We always try to be environmentally conscious. We recycle and donate a lot, and we both give to and receive from Freecycle on the Internet. We are building our house in the mountains to be as energy-efficient as possible. At the same time, we don’t claim that we are better than anybody else; we are certainly using up our share of the world’s environment and energy.
Energy use has become increasingly troublesome lately, with alarms that range from the world oil situation to the threat of global warming and Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth.” America is a particular waster of energy. (Remember, our President once declared that America’s energy policy should be one of “consumption.”)
A household that drives 40 miles per day will travel almost 15,000 miles per year. With a normal automobile rating of 30 mpg, that amounts to 500 gallons of gas. And at $2.50 a gallon, the gas cost alone is $1,250 a year, not including the environment and energy expense.
The latest statistic that we’ve heard is that for the current cost of the war in Iraq, the same money could buy a year’s worth of gasoline for every driver in America. If you turn that around, the amount of gas that the U.S. consumes in one year is enough to fund the entire war in Iraq.
In 1998, when we first heard about Toyota’s upcoming Prius hybrid automobile, we signed up to buy one – sight-unseen – a full year before they were released. As a result, we were one of the first families in the San Francisco Bay Area to own one. Six and a half years after the 2000 release, we are on the verge of passing 100,000 miles on our Prius.
Even with a hybrid automobile, we find that running short errands to the store or post office is an incredible waste of gas. Short trips are the most wasteful; the car has had barely enough time to warm up before we shut it down again. When Russell was commuting 15 miles to Palo Alto for work, he took the bus every day.
For the past six months, we’ve been researching even more energy-efficient vehicles. We have looked at bicycles, electric bicycles, mopeds, scooters, motorcycles, and even Smartcars.
Quite by chance, we stumbled upon a full-sized, completely electric scooter – the “GreenEmotor” – when we saw one being raffled at a local shopping mall. We had difficulty finding any information about these vehicles; the company is a small start-up and there are no reviews anywhere on the web. Amazingly, we discovered that Green Elec-Motor’s company headquarters is about 15 miles from our house.
The day before New Year’s Eve, we paid an impromptu visit to the company. Gail started chatting with the Sales Manager and bragged that Russell was a writer. The Sales Manager offered to lend Russell some scooters if he would write some reviews.
A sign at GreenEmotor's company headquarters
