When is a Range Rover like a small electric car?

They say love is blind. If the object of your love goes unappreciated by most, your blindness probably becomes all the more pronounced and your love all the more heartfelt. Auto IT has seen it among urban 4x4 drivers, who can become belligerent in their defence of their lumbering cars, now that growing numbers of people consider them indefensible.

Now Auto IT is seeing it among fans of the G-Wiz. They so love their cars, spurned by most, that they cannot bring themselves to see fault.

Wanting to learn more about how ordinary owners of the G-Wiz had responded to the bad news that their car wasn’t a car, and would fold up around them like damp rag in a crash, Auto IT joined the online G-Wiz Owners Club and zipped along to its thriving forum.

In a forum thread on safety, the first material comment came from “Mark time”:

“I am sure that we would all agree that the danger does not lie with the G-Wiz itself but with the nature of some other vehicles that it has to share the roads with.”

Which is a bit of a startling statement. Given that two G-Wiz colliding head-on could easily wreak the havoc created by Top Gear, it is clearly a statement borne more of love than reason. And it turns out that this contributor should not have been so sure that everyone would agree:

“The G-Wiz is not a quadracycle .... it's a car,” responded “nat” in a follow-up post. “When it looks like a car... when it drives like a car... when it is bought as a car... then it's a car.” This member went on to observe that “the makers of the G-Wiz will have to address the safety issue quickly if they are to survive in the marketplace”.

Member “Matt”, meanwhile, saw conspiracy theories at the Beeb: “This deliberate reputation-damaging enterprise has been orchestrated by Top Gear for the amusement of the petrolheads. The BBC are hammering the story to hell on their news programs in a thinly veiled promotion of Top Gear.” Yes, never mind the microscope that BBC news programmes are still under since the Hutton Inquiry, they’ll sex-up a bit of non-news to boost an already highly popular brand like Top Gear. Hmmm.

Back to reality: member “ashaw”, who joined the forum solely to find out if his G-Wiz was safe, had this to say: “When I bought my car there was no mention in the sales pitch of it only meeting safety standards of a quadricycle - it was sold as an an electric car that meets all the safety standards ... you obviously buy the 'car' as an environmental statement but you want to be safe. I bought mine to do the school run so I particularly asked about safety as an issue at the test drive. With two young children in the car I don't want to feel that I am risking their lives by using it.”

Would this plea to think of the little children remove the scales from the eyes of the hard-core fans, and make them at least admit that the G-Wiz might be a teeny bit unsafe?

“Would I be any safer on a motorbike or pedal bike than in my G-Wiz? I think not,” said member “Tim”.

Which didn’t reassure “bakerstreet”, who used a G-Wiz for business. “I assumed, like some other people, that it was as a safe as a car and now I see it is not. I cannot accept the ‘it is safer than a bicycle/motorbike’ argument - this vehicle is neither of these and I am one of many people who own a G-wiz who would never get on a motorbike.”

It's worth visiting the owners club if you're at all interested in EVs. But Auto IT was surprised. There is not much outrage among those who have paid rather a lot of good money to own a G-Wiz, and instead there seem to be rather a lot of owners in a state of blissful denial.

As it turns out these fans have more than a little in common with 4x4 owners. Both can’t see the faults in their vehicle of choice. And neither owns a car that’s fit for taking the kids to school.

What it says on the tin

This decal on the rear of a Smart ForTwo cabrio in London today raised a smile.

Who ya gonna call when your G-Wiz conks out?

Seeing all those pictures of crashed G-Wiz quadricycles made Auto IT wonder what happens if the worst doesn’t happen - but you do have a little knock, a minor breakdown, or simply run out of juice two miles from the nearest socket and can’t continue your journey.

At least one member of the G-Wiz Owners Club has ended up with curly tail between legs, calling out the AA to trailer home a plastic pig with a dead electric motor. Another member pointed to the Environmental Transport Association (ETA), which is a sort of lentil-fuelled alternative to the mainstream breakdown services, but has not had to call them out yet.

Most G-Wizzes on the road are still relatively new, of course, but might be expected to break down a little more often as they rack up the miles shuddering their way over London's scabrous and pot-holed roads. Punctures are also an issue, bearing in mind there’s no spare wheel and not every gash in a tyre can be filled with a can of aerosol goo.

Auto IT got in touch with the AA and the RAC to find out if their patrols are equipped to do more than suck teeth and scratch heads at the scene of an electric-car breakdown. Would they attempt to diagnose faults and effect a roadside repair or simply winch a stricken G-Wiz onto a low-loader?

The response from the RAC was suitably encouraging: “Our technical team always looks to ‘get under the bonnet’ of new vehicles as soon as possible after they are introduced to the market, and indeed in the case of the G-Wiz we have recently attended their premises to undertake a data gathering exercise on the workings of the vehicle,” said RAC spokesman Jon Day. “This information is then fed into the central computer system that our patrols access at the roadside in order that they have the correct information available to them as they attempt to fix vehicles.”

The AA has so far not responded, but Auto IT will pass on any comment as it arrives.

G-Wiz drivers: don't believe Boris

People as eminent as Boris Johnson MP are parroting GoinGreen's defence that it’s not feasible to build a safe, affordable electric car, following the recent crash-test furore. Johnson is not the kind of person Auto IT would go for advice on, well, anything, but his argument nonetheless merits dissection. Is it inevitable that a car built to fit within the cost-beneficial “quadricycle” category has to be as sturdy as a wendy-house?

In short, no. The rival Mega City electric city car may be 20 percent more expensive than the G-Wiz and it may be six percent heavier (at 705kg versus 665kg including batteries) but it has passed the crash tests required of proper cars in Europe.

The Nice Car Company, UK importer of the French Mega City, was surprising, er, nice about its rivals’ woes. Spokesman Julian Wilford said, “I would point out that the Department for Transport has not stated that the G-Wiz has failed any tests. They said, ‘The vehicle tested passed all the European requirements applicable to quadricyles, but when it was subjected to the same impact test expected of normal cars serious safety concerns were highlighted.’”

Nice also notes that its own Mega City was voluntarily put through crash tests - passing was never a requirement for the vehicle to be approved for sale to the public.

The company also made some further arresting observations: “Transport for London’s own estimates are that every year some 1,000 premature deaths (and a similar number of hospital admissions) are caused by London’s poor air quality. It’s a sobering fact that we are about four times more likely to be killed in London by the effects of traffic pollution than directly in a road traffic accident and that we are about twenty times more likely to be killed by the effects of vehicles on London’s roads than by actually driving a car on London’s roads. Car occupant safety is only a small part of the road safety issue.”

No doubt Nice is keen for its own product not to be splattered by the tar and feathers currently hitting the G-Wiz.

Crashed G-Wiz: update and pics

Top Gear has published pictures of its own recent crash test of the Reva G-Wiz, albeit at a higher speed than the DfT's test (at 64km/h versus 56km/h). The crash test dummy's body had to be extricated from the wreckage separately from the legs, apparently. Ouch.

Meanwhile, the Nice Car Company got back to us, after Auto IT's previous post, with a prepared statement about its vehicles. It confirmed that "The Mega City has been subjected to and passed all European safety tests that would be conducted for a traditional car. These would include side, front and rear impact and these are done by the French approval authorities."

Nice Car Company co-founder Evert Guertsen also had harsh words for UK Roads Minister Stephen Ladyman; "The minister’s statement that the quadricycle regulation was never envisaged to cover mainstream use is questionable. In fact there are more than 300,000 vehicles categorised as a quadricycle on the road in Europe and they have outstanding safety records."

The Mega City may be more expensive than the G-Wiz, but it seems like the extra cash might be money well spent.

Crash, bang, wallop: try not to crash your electric car

Surely nobody can be too surprised by news that GoinGreen’s G-Wiz is not the ideal vehicle in which to be hit by a lumbering 4x4. The little electric runabout, which qualifies as a “quadricycle” in law (but which Auto IT prefers to think of as a wheeled plastic pig), was hurled at a deformable barrier on April 10th by the UK’s Department for Transport. Auto IT has not seen pictures of the tests, which were done to the standards required of conventional cars, but they no doubt resemble a soft-boiled egg being struck with a cricket bat.

In an article at The Times, GoinGreen bleats that safety would make the G-Wiz too heavy to qualify for the quadricycle category, opening it up to the full rules governing proper motor cars, which would in turn push up prices and balloon running costs. This seems like an iffy defence, bearing in mind that the weight assessment is done before the heavy batteries are inserted, and also that rival electric quadricycle the Mega City, sold by the Nice Car Company but made by Aixam in France, has - allegedly - passed the very same tests.

Auto IT has asked Nice for comment on the safety-equals-weight-plus-cost issue and will pass any feedback on in due course.