The car of the future is an EV golf cart

0:02Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Quadricycles. I'm your friend David Pierce and today on the show we're going to talk about EVs. But not EVs like we normally talk about EVs. There's this new kind of burgeoning trend of these cars that are essentially golf carts that are trying to become everybody's second vehicle. Sure, own your pickup, own your giant SUV, but maybe instead of buying a second car, you might buy one of these. It's a new kind of car, it's It's a new kind of electric car. And I think there's something big happening here. Verge's Andy Hawkins is going to come on and talk about it.

0:35We'll get right to that. But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, July 21st, 2026. Light, the company that you might have heard of that's made minimalist phones over the last decade or so, announced its first flip phone, the Light Flip. It's roughly what you think. It's a Light Phone in flip phone form. But I keep thinking about one thing Light's co-founder told me. that they made a flip phone specifically because people actively didn't want to be seen using a smartphone. Something big is changing in our relationship with technology, and this phone is right out in front of it.

1:07I'm going to buy one of these, and then I'm going to buy whatever insanely expensive foldable Samsung launches tomorrow, and just live in full-on phone extremes. I'm very excited about it. Meanwhile, a judge officially approved a settlement that will see Anthropic pay$1.5 billion to a group of authors who accused it of using more than 7 million of their books to train AI models. That is a big number, obviously. But there's a bigger story here, too. There are a lot of copyright lawsuits out there, just like this one, accusing AI companies of stealing data to train LLMs. This one is a settlement, not a guilty verdict.

1:40And the specifics of the case are actually kind of messy. It's about how the books were copied and stored, not that they were used specifically in LLMs. but it still sets a high price for settlement and it sets an important precedent for all of those other suits and the many, many, many ones still to come. Finally, The Verge's Justine Kalma has a big story out today about the real environmental cost of data centers or even of one single GPU. I feel like it's often hard to understand how much energy, water, and other resources are being gobbled up by the AI industry but also by our technology everywhere including like the phone in our pockets.

2:14You should check it out and see what it really costs. You can see more on all of this at TheVerge.com. That's 90 seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, July 21st.

2:47the U.S. and Canada, with claims paid back in as little as two days. Go to FetchPet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's FetchPet.com slash save.

3:04Support for the show comes from MongoDB. AI-assisted and agentic coding is helping you build faster than ever. But if your data layer is still a bottleneck, what's the point? Instead of wrestling with rigid schemas or translating data formats, MongoDB's native data model mirrors the language LLMs already speak. It ships at the speed of AI, is ACID compliant, and scales to handle massive Fortune 500 workloads. Developers have a word for that kind of reliability. Actually, five words. It's a great frickin' database. Start building at mongodb.com slash AI. All right, let's talk EVs that aren't exactly cars.

3:48Joining me now, Andy Hawkins, the Virgis Transportation Editor. Hello, sir. Hello. So I want to get into sort of the big picture stuff going on here, but I want you to start by telling me just sort of the story of this new company called Chip Motors that you've been writing about. So let's start there. Tell me who Chip Motors is and kind of what they're up to. Yeah, so they're a Miami-based startup. I was just talking to the CEO the other day. And he talked about how, you know, he's been like in the tech sector for a long time and he sold a camera company to like a scooter operator in Europe and had some money to play around with.

4:21So he was interested in - There's a sentence. I know, right? And he's been very interested in the idea of like right-sizing American cars, because it seems like everybody has to buy big trucks and SUVs for sort of every kind of use case that you can imagine. And he thinks that that's not really the right idea. And he's been sort of paying attention to this kind of like quiet, underreported growth in like golf cart sales. Because if you look at like micro cars specifically, like tiny little cars like Microlina and Fiat, those aren't doing too well in the US. But golf carts, low speed, cap to 25 miles per hour, are actually selling at increasingly higher and higher rates.

5:07You're seeing especially in these warm weather markets like in Florida and the Sunbelt where people are using them as second cars. They still have the Escalades and the F-150s in their driveways. But then they use these golf carts specifically for short trips, grocery trips, dropping the kids off at school, taking them to the park, soccer practice, what have you. And so his idea was, okay, we don't have to just rely on these ugly, sort of de-featured golf carts for everything. There needs to be some sort of middle ground between the F-150s and the golf carts. And so his idea was Chip, which is a very small, capped at 25 miles per hour, sort of looks like a Jeep Wrangler got hit by a shrink ray.

5:52It's a little bit boxier. It does. That's a really good description. It's taller than your average golf cart. It has a tall windshield, can seat four, can be specced out to seat six, actually. But no doors on it and isn't subject to the same regulatory requirements that most vehicles would be. Which is like, this is kind of like, I feel like is at the center of all this. This sort of regulatory loophole, which we could talk about in a second. But his idea was, let's give him something fun, give him something quirky. Obviously, it's going to have like self-driving operations and AI integration and all of that that, you know, everything has to have in this cursed year that we live in.

6:35But I do think that the idea gets at something that is original and interesting, which is that, you know, people are looking for second cars that aren't actually cars. And this kind of like seems to serve that market. Yeah, there's a trend happening here that I feel like we're literally sort of at the point now where a three is a trend, right? You covered this company called Amble, which I think is based in Portugal, that is building something very similar. Maybe the single raddest looking golf cart I've ever seen. Oh, yeah. It's so sick. If the other one is like a Jeep Wrangler hit with a shrink ray, this is like a golf cart from Mad Max Fury Road.

7:14And I mean that in the best possible way. Like it rules. And then there's the Fiat Topolino, which is this another sort of tiny little adorable guy designed to be on the streets. So what is sparking this trend? Like why is this happening right now, do you think? I think that a lot of people are going to shop for second cars and are finding themselves unsatisfied with their options because there has been this long gestating trend shift away from from sedans. There's also, obviously, we have this affordability crisis going on in the auto market today where prices, average transaction prices have been steadily increasing pretty much on a hyperscale since the pandemic.

7:57Where now they're sitting somewhere around the$50 ,000 range for the average price of just whatever car you want to buy. There are just no cheap cars available anymore. Many outlets have covered this phenomenon. And so I think people are going to their dealers and coming away dissatisfied with their options. They don't want to spend that much money on something which they see as a second vehicle. And so they're looking for something else. And I think these companies, some of these startups, they have different business models. They have sort of different ideas of how to different kind of customers that they're thinking about.

8:31But they are sort of all sort of centered around the idea of like, what if you don't have to buy, you know, a giant four-door SUV or truck? You know, what if you can have something that's smaller and fits a little bit better with the types of trips that you're trying to take? And then I think as a side of that, there's also sort of like electrification, the rise in popularity of e-bikes, and sort of how all of that is kind of converging with people looking for alternate transportation methods. the idea of having this both as the, you know, drive to the grocery store car and as the one the kid can take that is, it's sort of the dumb phone version of a car.

9:11And I mean that as a compliment, it is, it is, it's safer, it's simpler, it's less complicated to, to manage and maintain. It is, it is a thing you can feel much more comfortable turning your kid loose with. I find very exciting. We've tried this in the US many times. Going way back, I have been thinking about and a proponent of all of these various last mile solutions for forever, right? We talk all the time about how most trips are short and your giant Ford F-150 is massively overkill for the two mile drives that most of us do most of the time. And yet, especially here in the US, none of it has really happened.

9:50More people are biking than ever. This is your chance if you'd like to to once again extol the virtues of a cargo bike. All that is well and good. And yet, at least as far as I can tell, we are still as much a big car economy as anything. So I guess next to all of that, how would you handicap the possibility of these as a real mainstream phenomenon in the United States, which is very different from a lot of the other places that we're talking about here? Yeah, I think that there's absolutely still a long road to travel. And it's very much uphill, which I think a lot of these vehicles would struggle with because of their torque capabilities.

10:26But at the same time, it's - As long as it's a gentle hill, we'll be okay. A slope, you know, a gentle slope. But no, I do think that we're starting to see some examples of, you know, some market penetration. I think, you know, I mentioned how in Europe, teenagers are driving some of these vehicles. here in the U.S. I think what we're starting to see some of these Sunbelt communities, Florida and elsewhere, you go to some of the high schools and you'll see just like golf carts in the parking lot as opposed to traditional vehicles. Like the teenagers are driving them to and from school. They're driving them to football practice.

11:03They're driving them to the beach. 16 year old me would have been so pumped to drive a golf cart everywhere. Like truly, this is such a victory of an idea for teenagers. I'm so into it. It is kind of like the solution. I mean, everyone's sort of like tearing their hair out about this like e-moto problem with teenagers, especially. Right. They're driving these sort of like very powerful, very fast electric motorbikes. And a lot of states are starting to crack down on that. They're getting kind of freaked out. I think the solution is these sort of like more golf cart style vehicles, these low speed electric vehicles that can cap out at 25 miles per hour.

11:36Right. They're not legal everywhere. They're only supposed to be driven on roads where the posted speed limit is 35 miles per hour. But that said, it is, I think it's starting to emerge. You can see these communities are seeing this as a solution. But, you know, that's not everywhere, right? That's warm weather communities, beach style communities. It's not going to be the same for, you know, a dense place like New York City or Washington, D.C. or elsewhere. But, you know, I talked to these guys from Amble and from Chip, and they're talking about, you know, like ways that they see they could sort of kind of squeeze, start to squeeze in.

12:10They see the phenomenon potentially spreading to more and more communities. It might not be the right fit for everywhere. But I do think that they're optimistic about the long-term prospects. Okay. What is the regulatory environment here in that front in the U.S.? And maybe the answer is this is new enough that no one quite knows. But you have trained me over the years to understand that a big part of what is happening with EVs in general, broadly defined, is as much a regulatory problem as it is a technology problem. What is going on with these things in terms of what it will take to get them up and running in sort of a mainstream way in the United States?

12:49Well, I think that's why some of these companies are as optimistic as they are, because they see the regulatory sort of threshold as being a lot lower than it is for your average vehicle, even your average electric vehicle. So a lot of these vehicles, Chip and Amble and others, would qualify as low-speed electric vehicles under the federal motor safety standards. And basically, that means they don't have to have all the things that your traditional car has to have. They don't have to have airbags, crumple zones, anti-lock brakes, advanced driver assist systems, backup cameras, all of these things because they have these extreme limitations, right?

13:31They're capped at 25 miles per hour. And that's basically all they basically have to have are headlights, taillights, a turn signal, rear view mirrors, side mirrors, parking brakes, and seatbelts. Interesting. That's it. And so it's not a long list. It's not. That's easy. And so I talked to the CEO from Chip Motors. He's like, it's basically two pages of regulations. So I think that that's why they think that they have maybe a little bit more breathing room in terms of who they can market these vehicles to. and also they can play around with the design, right? Like you see with Amble hiring designers from Apple to build this very gorgeous looking open air buggy with like, you know, nice materials and things like that because all they have to do is sort of follow this very short list of regulations.

14:24So I think it's an interesting sort of gray area that these vehicles sort of find themselves in. And that's sort of leading to some of the excitement around them. Are they also, as a result, much easier to manufacture? Again, the other thing you've trained me in is that, boy, is it hard to build cars. And boy, do most companies fall apart before they figure out how. I would assume just looking at these things that they must be much easier to actually build and that that might be a huge boon for these companies trying to pull this off. Yeah, I think so. I think that that is the assumption. I think we still have to wait and see.

14:56A lot of these companies are still very new. and for more established automakers like Fiat, which is bringing the Topolino, the$15 ,000 Topolino back to America. You know, they have obviously the margins to absorb any losses that they might experience there. But yeah, I think they're going to be using contract manufacturers. Maybe they'll assemble it here in the US, but they'll be getting off the shelf parts for a lot of this kind of stuff. And I think a lot of the innovation will come through the design and how sort of they differentiate themselves from like your typical golf cart, right? So in Chip's example, it's designing something that kind of looks like a Jeep Wrangler, but also has sort of like a spacious frunk for groceries and a big LED screen on the front bumper with kind of like winking digital eyes that could kind of give it like a kind of a quirky personality.

15:49Yeah, there's a picture on their website that it looks like it's doing sort of a half smile in a way that is, I can't tell if I would grow to hate this after about two weeks of seeing it or if it is genuinely the most adorable thing I've ever seen in a car. Yeah, I don't know if there's necessarily a market for that. That to me is a little bit less interesting overall than the idea of there being an actual viable market in the U.S. for these vehicles. You can slap your agentic AI and your remote parking features on it. That's fine. I think that's a way to differentiate yourself from the competition.

16:21I think the real question is, do people want these vehicles? Are they going to buy them? And if so, how are they going to use them? Support for the show comes from Shopify. Landing on a good idea for a business is basically catching lightning in a bottle. What are the odds it'll happen more than once? You have to jump on every opportunity to make it work. And the last thing you need is to get slowed down by clunky logistics. You want tools that are ready to go right out of the box. And if your business involves e-commerce, you need Shopify. Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide, from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to small businesses just getting started.

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19:41There's a civil war happening in the Democratic Party. And if there's one place that that's playing out most clearly, it's in Michigan. A crucial Senate primary battle in Michigan that could determine control of Congress in November. Congresswoman Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed. A progressive Democrat and a moderate Democrat. In the end, it all comes down to the dreaded E-word, electability. But in Michigan, one candidate is trying to turn the electability concept on its head. If we think that voters walk around asking, where do I sit on some theoretical left-right spectrum? Then in theory, the bulk of the voters are somewhere in the middle.

20:18The problem, though, is that that model hasn't really accurately predicted our politics for a very long time. If Michiganders wanted moderate, why would they have elected Donald Trump twice? Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is making the progressive case for America first. And he's trying to settle the Democrats' ideological battle in the process. This is about the money versus the money. I'm Ested Herndon, and this is America Actually. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

20:48So if this works, it seems like there is a huge set of stuff you could in theory do along these same lines, right? I think back to the early days of self-driving when the question was, are we going to end up completely redesigning the car as a result? And you look at like a Zoox, which invented a very different looking thing to carry you around based fully on self-driving. I think in general, self-driving is probably too new and we just haven't pushed all the way down that road. But it strikes me as this being another huge possibility for that, that if indeed these folks are right, that there is space here for something that is deliberately slower, that is substantially simpler and smaller, that this might be another chance to kind of reinvent the idea of what these are supposed to be.

21:38Is your sense that these companies are thinking about that? I mean, all of these, like you said, everybody calls them golf carts because they functionally look like golf carts. Do you think that's where this lands? Or is there some potential for weirdness and innovation here? I'm hopeful that there's potential for weirdness and innovation because that's where the Verge operates, right? That's true. That's where the fun is. That's where we live. And I do think that there is going to need to be some sort of like psychological shift in the American mindset towards how they shop for cars and what they buy.

22:08And I think that - Which car companies have been trying to make happen for decades and with very little success. Very little success, exactly. And we're starting to see that now with a lot of the reversals that we're seeing in the electric vehicle market. That said, there is still an electric vehicle market. It still exists. People are still buying these cars. Tesla is having a little bit of a resurgence. And I think things are starting to stabilize in that market. That said, I do think that we need to sort of wrap our heads around why it is we've allowed the auto industry to convince us for so long that we need a F-150 just to go to the grocery store for like five bags of groceries, right?

22:44It's not necessary when you live in the suburbs to have this giant hulking SUV that doesn't even, or truck that doesn't even really fit in your garage that was built in maybe like the 1950s. So it is kind of like this idea of like right sizing our transportation needs. And I think that it's going to be a tall ask. We're such a big country. We're so spread out. It's much different value proposition than it is in Europe, which is denser and closer together. The cities and the communities are much closer together. And we just have all of this wide open space. So there is going to always be people who want big vehicles that can take them long distances.

23:25The question is, I think in that second vehicle market is where I think you're going to start to see a lot of this weirdness and innovation. Is it an e-bike? Is it a quadricycle? Is it a golf cart? Or is it just another smaller Toyota RAV4 or Honda CRV or whatever? So I think that that's going to be sort of the challenge, right? They're not going to be maybe necessarily competing against your Escalades and your F-150s. They're going to be competing against your Kias and your Hyundais and your sort of more compact vehicles that are kind of have been traditionally serving those needs and whether or not people are going to be willing to downsize from those compact vehicles.

24:05Yeah, I have to say that actually makes me feel slightly more optimistic about these things' chances. Because again, what we've learned over and over is that you will not unseat the giant pickup trucks. They will get ever more giant, they will get ever more expensive, and they will keep selling. And that is just where we are. But it does seem like everything else is kind of gettable at this point. Like the idea of building the sort of cheap sedan seems to just get harder and harder, especially in an EV world when people have range anxiety and are worried about what these things cost. And so if you can come in and say, well, we have and this is to some extent the same pitch for the slate truck, right?

24:42Yeah, exactly. We do less, but you don't need a car that does everything like that. That feels like when you're coming in as sort of the second complimentary vehicle and actually really compelling case to be like, you have a car that does all this other stuff. We are going to be really perfectly tuned to a much smaller set of things. And by the way, we cost one third of what that other one costs. And it just feels like maybe that space is more open than we realize. I have no idea how good a business that space is, right? That has tended to be lower margin and a very different kind of customer than a lot of these other car companies are looking for.