The following is a story sent to us by a happy eGO customer.
"I have put almost 800 miles on my eGO Cycle in less than a year."
- Mark L., Redondo Beach, CA
I've been interested in alternative fuels at least since the late 1980's. I decided to start promoting alternative fuels more broadly by starting a website (now at www.altfuels.org) to provide "informed consumer" information about alternative-fueled vehicles. All this time, though, I was aware that the van, besides being overkill for a single guy (which I was until a couple of years ago), was far larger than I needed for my eleven-mile round-trip commute to and from work, not to mention the occasional two or three miles to church or the grocery store.
I had long been looking at electric scooters but I could never persuade myself to spend $2500 and up on one. Then, after I got married and we bought a house even closer to my job and cut my commute to seven miles round-trip, eGO Vehicles had a half-price sale on factory demo models of the eGO Cycle 1, cutting the price from $1399 to $699! Since, at current prices, compressed natural gas for my van costs almost a dollar and a half per day's commute (ignoring expenditures for wear and tear, oil changes, etc.), my wife and I figured that one of these could pay for itself in just a few years, and I grabbed one in August 2003.
So, over a decade after I first got interested in EVs, and despite the automakers' efforts to kill them off, I'm finally commuting using electricity! Since I live in Southern California, the weather seldom prevents me from taking an eGO trip to work or to choir rehearsals, though in winter I do have to bundle up against wind chill from a 20 MPH slipstream! I travel a lot so I don't commute from home about 20% of the time, and having our first child a month after I got the eGO Cycle made for more errands for which I needed four wheels; despite this, I have put almost 800 miles on my eGO Cycle in less than a year.
I find it very pleasant to be consuming energy at a rate equivalent to several hundred miles per gallon, almost none of which is actually from oil; and especially since my little daughter's lungs are now breathing the air around here, I am happy to be generating just a few percent of the pollution that I would otherwise be responsible for, even with my natural-gas van!