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Hudson, N.H., car dealer juiced up about all-electric Wheego
HUDSON, N.H., May 15, 2010 (The Sun - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
Quietly, the electric-car revolution is under way, Dan Enxing said.
Enxing, president of Subaru of Nashua, is the exclusive Massachusetts and New Hampshire dealer of the Wheego Whip, a two-seat, electric-powered car that travels 40 miles on an eight-hour charge at a top speed of 35 mph.
"It's a funny name (Wheego) but a really cool car. The first step in the electric-car revolution," said Enxing.
Popular demand for a mass-produced electric car "has been building up repeatedly, and getting stalled. Now they're here and it's going to start taking off," said Enxing, who invited a Sun reporter to test-drive one of three Wheegos parked in his Lowell Road lot.
"By the time my kid is ready to take over
the dealership, probably half the cars being sold will be electric," he said.
Boasting just six employees at its headquarters in Atlanta, Wheego sprung from the imagination of Mindspring Internet startup multimillionaire Mike McQuarry, who in 2009 decided he wanted to produce and sell electric cars far from the stodgy mindset of Detroit.
"We don't want to be the biggest car company or make the fastest cars," reads McQuarry's mission statement on the wheego.net website. "We won't hype or exaggerate the capabilities of our electric cars."
After learning about the company in a phone conversation with a friend who has a dealership in Florida, Enxing arranged a meeting with Wheego executives in
Atlanta in February. Enxing admires the company's low-key approach, and emphasis on making sure the cars are a good fit for their customers, he said.
"Most of the selling is going to be done on the Internet. It's not everybody that wants to buy one of these," Enxing pointed out. "You don't want somebody to spend 20 grand on a car and then find out it's not for them."
Enxing plans to begin selling Whips to the public in mid-June. His most likely customers will be cities and towns who want to "green up" their municipal fleets, military bases, and college and corporate campus security services, he expects.
A Whip retails for $19,000, which will be further offset by a 20 percent tax credit. In September, Wheego will unveil a highway-ready sedan that travels 100 miles on an eight-hour charge at a top speed of 70 mph, and priced at $32,000, which is further offset by a $7,500 tax credit, according to Enxing.
In the same rear-quarter-panel spot where motorists are used to filling their gas tank, Wheego-ers find an appliance-style, three-pronged plug ready to take a charge from a power cord plugged into a standard outlet. There are two types of power cords, a regular one that completes a full charge in eight hours, and a larger-capacity cord that does it in four, Enxing said.
The car's batteries are in the rear floor of the car; a conventional car battery under the front hood powers the radio and lights. Instead of a gas gauge that reads "full" to "empty," both a digital screen and dial-gauge show percentage of battery power remaining.
While most of the parts and technology are American-made and assembly takes place in California, the Wheego chassis and body are made in China. The design so closely resembles the look of a Mercedes-Benz that the German car-maker has filed a lawsuit.
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