It’s good to know what you’re not allowed to have as it’s a good measure of just how mean-minded and duplicitous are the people are who don’t allow you to have it. But the Bingo EV is a new take on the concept. You’re allowed to buy one – the cost is just $12,000. You’re just not allowed to drive one, yourself.

Well, not here in America.

You pay the $12k to buy the Bingo and then some guy in Kenya or South Africa drives it – paying you a lease fee to use it. Ostensibly, the idea is to uplift the masses in “developing” countries, where buying a car is an extravagance, by providing them a vehicle they can use to make money doing the ride-share thing. The American who buys the Bingo gets paid while the ride-share guy in Kenya gets charged. But why can’t an American who would like to be able to buy a $12,000 Bingo – which by the way has a swappable battery that can be removed and replaced in just a a couple of minutes – buy a Bingo to drive himself?

If you answered – because the government won’t allow it – that’s a bingo.

The Bingo is very small and very light, in part because it has a very small (13 KWh) battery – which is why its battery can be easily removed and swapped out for a new (fully charged) one in far less time than it takes to gas up a typical car and far less time than it takes to recharge the battery of any EV Americans are allowed to buy. Check that, allowed to drive. It also reportedly has more than 300 miles of fully charged driving range – once again because it’s small and light and so efficient.

But it is not compliant – which is a function of it being small and light. It is considered “unsafe” – by the federal regulatory apparat (specifically the Department of Transportation and its NHTSA adjunct) because it does not protect occupants from impact forces to the degree required of passenger vehicles per the various “standards” laid down by the federal safety apparat.

Well, motorcycles and mopeds – which we are still allowed to buy – have zero occupant protection. Of course, the standards laid down for cars do not apply to motorcycles and mopeds, but doesn’t that make the point? The federal “safety” apparat allows exceptions to its edicts. More finely, it imposes arbitrary “standards” for different kinds of vehicles. Motorcycles and mopeds are still relatively inexpensive precisely because they are allowed to be sold according to different “standards” that do not require them to pass crash tests or have air bags.

Well, if “safety” is the thing, why does the government allow exceptions to that thing? Best not to give the government ideas. Of course, it is certain the government would love to apply the same “standards” to motorcycles and mopeds, but it isn’t feasible because it’s not realistically possible to make a crash-test compliant, air-bag-equipped motorcycle or moped for basically the same reason it isn’t possible to turn a a gazelle into an elephant. Motorcycles and mopeds are only allowed because they predated the rise of the Safety Cult. They would never be allowed today, if they were a new invention.

Kind of like the Bingo is not allowed.

But why shouldn’t they be?

The whole EV push is based on the claim that it’s imperative – it is existentially important! – to replace gas and diesel-powered vehicles with “clean” battery powered vehicles, yet the ones pushed – the only ones allowed – are overweight, over-priced things models that require subsidies to sell and even that is not enough of an inducement because they are still too expensive to buy (and too impractical to use) for most people to find them a compelling alternative to a gas or diesel-powered vehicle.

This Bingo, on the other hand, is priced $10k less than the least expensive gas-engined vehicle you’re allowed to buy in this country. It doesn’t cost much more than a motorcycle, in fact. Put another way, almost anyone who could afford to buy a new full-sized motorcycle could afford a Bingo. The payments – not counting interest – would be $200 per month for five (not six or seven) years. Given that even a very fuel efficient car that gets say 40 MPG and has a 15 gallon tank currently costs about $70 to fill up once – courtesy of Trump’s stupid, evil war – and given most people have to fill up once a week, a Bingo EV would cost them less to buy than it costs to fuel a 40 MPG car.

Not counting what you paid for the car.

It does not get to 60 in 3 seconds. It hasn’t got highway legs. But the Bingo would work really well, probably, for millions of people who’d just like a cheap little runabout/commuter car to get them from A to B in urban/suburban driving scenes. But we’re not allowed the option – because compliance trumps “the environment,” which ought to tell you everything you need to know about that.

Also, weren’t we promised Tiny Cars by the president? Whatever happened to that promise? Apparently, the same thing that happened to those promises about how our energy bills would be cut in half and we’d be getting $5,000 DOGE checks and that we’d get to the bottom of that Epstein Stuff.

. . .

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