Why Electric Golf Carts Are Becoming the Next Big Thing in Personal Transportation

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Quadriccycles. 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 a new kind of electric car. And I think there's something big happening here. Verge is Andy Hawkins is going to come on and talk about it. We'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. I'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 fullon 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. And 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 Virgin Justine KMA 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. You should check it out and see what it really costs. You can see more on all of this

at the verge.com. That's 90 seconds on the Verge for Tuesday, July 21st. All right, let's talk EVs that aren't exactly cars. Joining me now, Andy Hawkins, the Verge 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 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 uh startup. I uh was just talking to the CEO the other day. Uh and he talked about how um 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. So he was interested a sentence [clears throat] I know right and he's been very interested in the idea of like right sizing uh American uh cars uh you know 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's not really the right idea and he's been sort of paying attention to this kind of like quiet under reported um growth in like golf cart sales. Um 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, 25 capped

at 25 miles per hour are actually selling uh at increasingly higher and higher rates. You're seeing especially in these like warm weather markets like in Florida and the sunb belt uh where people are using them as second cars, right? They still have like the Escalades and the F-150s in their 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, why we don't have to just rely on these like ugly, you know, sort of deffeatured golf carts for everything. There needs to be some sort of like middle ground between the F-150s and the golf carts. And so his idea was

uh was Chip, which is a uh very small uh capped at 25 mph. Sort of looks like uh a Jeep Wrangler got hit by a shrink ray. Um it's a little bit boxier. It does. That's a really good description. It's It's taller than uh than your average golf car. Has like a tall windshield. Uh can seat four. It can be specked out to seat six actually. uh but no doors uh on it and uh isn't sort of subject to the same uh regulatory uh requirements that uh most vehicles would be. So uh which is like this is kind of like kind of I feel like is at the center of all this is this sort of regulatory loophole which we could talk

about in a second. But his idea was let's give him something fun, give them something quirky. Obviously, it's going to have like self-driving operations and AI integration and sure all of that you know everything has to have in uh this cursed year that we live in. But I do think that the idea gets at something that is original and interesting which is that you know people are looking for uh 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 uh this company called Amble, which I think is based in Portugal, that is building something very similar.

Maybe the single rad looking golf cart I've ever seen. It's like 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. And I mean that in the best possible way. Like it rules. And then uh 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 um from sedans. Uh 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 uh pretty much uh you know on a hyper scale since like the pandemic uh where now they're sitting somewhere around like the $50,000 range for the average price of just you know whatever car you want to buy. There are just no cheap cars available anymore. we have uh you know 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 uh 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 but they are sort of all sort of centered around the idea of like what if you don't have to buy uh you know a giant four-door SUV or truck. Uh, 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 you're trying to take? And then I think as a side of that, there's also sort of like uh electrification, uh the rise in popularity of ebikes 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. And I mean that as a compliment. It is it's safer. It's simpler. It's less complicated to manage and maintain. It is a thing you can feel much more comfortable turning your kid loose with. I find very exciting. Um we've tried this in the US many times. I like 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. More people are biking than ever. This is your chance if you'd like 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. There's and it's very much uphill which I think a lot of these vehicles would struggle

with because of their torque capabilities. Uh but at the same time uh it's as long as it's a gentle hill will be okay. A slope you know a gentle slope. Uh but no I do think that we're starting to see some examples uh of uh you know some market penetration. I think you know I mentioned how in Europe teenagers are driving some of these vehicles. Here in the US, I think what we're starting to see some of these Sunb Belt 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 uh traditional vehicles. Like the teenagers are driving them to and from school.

They're driving them to football practice. They're driving them would have been so pumped to drive a golf cart everywhere. Like truly, this is such a victory of an idea for teenagers. So into it. It is kind of like the solution. I mean, everyone's sort of like tearing their hair out about this like emoto problem with teenagers especially, right? They're driving these sort of like very powerful, very fast electric motorbikes. Um, and there a lot of states are starting to crack down on that. They're getting kind of freaked out. I think the solution is these, you know, sort of

like more golf cart style vehicles, these low-speed electric vehicles that can cap out at 25 miles per hour, right? They're not legal everywhere. Um, they're 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 that you can see these communities are seeing this as a solution. I but you know that's not everywhere, right? That's that's warm weather communities, beach style communities. Uh it's not going to be the same for you know a dense place like New York City or Washington DC or elsewhere. Um 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 starts to squeeze in. they see the phenomenon potentially spreading to more and more communities. It might not be the right fit for everywhere. Uh but I do think that they're they're optimistic about the long-term prospects. Okay. What is the regulatory environment here in that front in the US? 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. Uh 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? Well, I think that's why you uh 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 uh you know your average vehicle, your average electric even your average electric vehicle. Um so, uh you know, a lot of these vehicles uh Chip and Amble and others would qualify as uh low-speed electric vehicles under uh 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 uh airbags, crumple zones, anti-lock brakes, advanced driver assist systems, backup cameras, all of these things. Uh because they have these extreme limitations, right? They were capped at 25 miles per hour. Uh and that's basically all they basically had to have are headlights, tail lights, a turn signal, rearview mirrors, side mirrors, parking brakes, and seat belts. Interesting. That's it. And so I think it's not a long list. It's not. That's easy. And so, you know, I talked to the CEO from Chip Motors. He's like, it's basically two pages of regulations. Um, so I think that's why they think

that they have maybe a little bit more uh breathing room in terms of um who can they can market these vehicles to. Uh, 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. um with like you know uh nice materials and things like that because all they have to do is sort of um uh follow this very short list of regulations. So I think it's 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 might be a huge boon for these companies trying to pull this off. Yeah, I think so. I think that is the assumption. Uh I think we still have to wait and see. A lot of these companies are still very new. Um, and for more established automakers like Fiat, which is bringing the Top Alino,

uh, the $15,000 Top Alino back to America. Um, uh, you know, that they have obviously the margins to absorb any losses that they might experience there. But yeah, I think it's they're going to be using contract manufacturers. Uh, maybe they'll assemble it here in the US, but they'll be getting, you know, 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 uh and how sort of they differentiate themselves from like your typical golf cart, right? Which so in Chep's in Chips's uh example, you know, it's it's designing something that kind of looks like a Jeep Wrangler but also has sort of like, you know, a spacious frunk for groceries. Um

and a big LED screen uh on the front bumper with like kind of like winking uh um like digital eyes that could kind of give it like a kind of a quirky personality. Um, yeah, 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 on a car. Yeah, I don't know if that if there's necessarily a market for that. That to me is a little bit less interesting overall than the idea of uh there being an actual viable market in the US for these vehicles. You can slap your agentic AI and your remote parking

uh you know features on it. That's fine. And I think that's a way to differentiate yourself from the competition. I 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.

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can build a plan that fits your budget, and once approved, claims are paid back in as little as 2 days. To learn more, go to fetchpet.com/save. So 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 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 Zuks 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 uh this being another huge possibility for 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. Is 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 that's our that's where the Verge operates, right? That's that's true. That's where we live. Um, and I do think that there's 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. And I think that our 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 sort of the 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's having uh you know, a little bit of a resurgence and uh you know, 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 an F-150 just to go to the grocery store for like five bags of groceries, right? It'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 um it's going to be a tall ask. I just I you know we're such a big com 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 uh in the communities are much closer together and

we just have all of this wide open space. So there's there is going to always be uh you know people who want big vehicles that can take them long distances. The question is I think in that second vehicle market is where I think you're going to start to see uh a lot of this weirdness and innovation. Is it an ebike? Is it a quadricycle? Is it a golf cart? Or is it just another smaller, you know, Toyota, you know, RAV 4 or Honda CRV or whatever. So I think 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 uh your Kia and your Hyundai's and your sort

sort of more compact vehicles that are kind of serving those needs and whether or not people are going to be willing to downsize from those compact vehicles. Yeah, 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 getable 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?" Yeah, exactly. Like we do less, but you don't need a car that does everything like that feels like when you're coming in as sort of the second complimentary vehicle, an 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 1/3 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. But it does seem like the logic of that market has been the same for a very long time and no one has cracked it in some time and especially with EVs, especially if you can have you can solve people's range anxiety by saying, "Look, you're only going to take this thing 25 m hour and you're only going to drive it a few miles at a time." So, the idea of running out of power in the middle of a highway in Idaho is non-existent because it's not going to happen. Yeah. So, I don't know. there's something about that seems right to

me, but that same thing has felt right to me for a very long time and no one has quite cracked it yet. So, I'm I'm both optimistic and pessimistic at this. And something I brought up to the CEO of Chip was that, you know, uh it's not like there aren't any subcompact cars. We have Honda Fitz, we have Nissan Versus, we have, you know, uh Mini Coopers and what have you. And they can drive in the highway, right? They can go over 25 miles per hour. and he his uh his response was that you know a lot of these are European spec cars uh you know and they're sort of made for European driving and maybe they found like a market here in the US but this is a car that we're building for the US

specifically and what he cited was I thought was really interesting was that there are these communities in Florida and elsewhere that have started to build infrastructure for these cars right there are golf cart uh specific roads that connect schools and communities and parks and things like that uh that are kind of bike lanes and also uh used by some of these low- speed vehicles as well. The fact that there that doesn't exist nationwide, right? These are sort of very highly specific to some of these warm weather communities and you're not really seeing that same kind of diversity and infrastructure in a lot of these other uh communities across the country, which I think is maybe going to

be some of the limitations that some of these companies run into as well. If we want to see more micro, you know, sort of like form factors, we're also going to need to sort of shrink down our expectations around our roads and our infrastructure as well. Totally. Do you think these companies are also thinking about a uh robo taxi or even just ride sharing future here? I mean, you talk about these golf cart communities. You can pretty easily imagine the world in which these become useful, simple, relatively lowcost ways to move people around. Like, and again, a lot of the last mile things people talk about are things like college campuses and these relatively dense, relatively contained communities.

These things strike me as perfect for those. Is that part of the plan here? Yeah. The So, the chip CEO spoke specifically about this. like as uh autonomy gets better and more people are going to be relying on shared autonomous vehicles, whether they're road robo taxis or shuttles uh or whatever it is. He can see this as being something that graduates from being your second vehicle to perhaps your primary vehicle and the only one that you actually own. Uh because it does uh you know maybe fit more uh in the use cases that they see it where you're taking your kids to school and all this kind of stuff. you don't want to necessarily have to pay a subscription or what have you or a fair for robo taxis, but then you know

maybe when you get home you can uh summon the robo taxi to take you to work or what have you. So I do think that they're try and he's trying to factor that into the actual uh feature technology that is uh that is being embedded in this car right now. It's a tea operated remote uh assistance system where uh they have remote operators who will park the car for you. Uh, I haven't really seen that work at scale. So, that's something I'm a little bit more skeptical about than some of the other ideas that he's proposing. But, he says that eventually they'll they'll have some sort of autonomy feature, level four, fully driverless, that you can just summon the car to you when you want it, send it to

go park itself, you know, it'll drive you to where you need to go. Um, and because again you're dealing with something that is more lower speed and has these sort of guard rails, uh, it becomes sort of a very much uh, uh, maybe a better proposition for autonomy because you don't have to worry about going on the highway. You don't have to worry about going 70 mph. Uh, and when speed is not sort of like the uh, the end of everything, then you it sort of opens you up to sort of some more uh, technological innovation. This all sounds so good. Andy, this is the thing. Okay, before I let you go here, I need you to accurately calibrate my enthusiasm here because I look at something like the chip or like the Amble one

and it actually fits perfectly into my day-to-day life, right? We have a Hyundai SUV for when we need to go visit family or when we want to go far. But most of my driving most of the time is a mile and a half to my son's daycare and then six blocks to my other son's preschool and then about a mile to the coffee shop and then home. And that's I do that circle twice a day, every day, all week. And that plus the grocery store accounts for most of my driving that isn't, you know, it's trips like that. I have always struggled with the ebike thing because that's a little tricky, especially when I have kids. Like the just how do I get my kids on there to take the weather?

The weather is what it is. My wife gets very nervous about biking around cars. All these things. This seems perfect. And I'm like, I would next time we need a second car, maybe I ditch the hybrid sedan that we have and buy a golf cart and that becomes the future. So, I need you to tell me right now whether I should genuinely earnestly get my hopes up about this being a thing or if I need to pull back a little bit. I think that the only limitations I can see are uh you know, sort of the road diversity in your community, right? Like you're going to be on roads it sounds like that potentially are 40 mph roads or 50 mph roads. If you look at these I think

there is a 40 between here and there. I mean like if there if it's exclusively all 35 mph. I do think it is about like this psychological barrier that we all have where like yeah you live in it's a 25 mph road but you're really going 30 or it's a 35 mph road but you're really going 40. It's this idea that like we're always pushing the barrier a little bit, right? And I do think that is it's not just a psychological thing. I think it's also a market limitation as well. So, I think if we can break free of these mental bonds that we have around speed and quickness and getting to where we go as fast as possible all the time and just maybe enjoy the ride a little bit more, then I think the world opens

wide open from your mouth to the ears of everyone who drives near me all the time. That's I'll take it. It's it's it's always other drivers, right, David? Well, yeah. I go just a perfectly rational speed all the time. I'm imagining myself at 25 mph on our road just causing a ruckus every single morning. I think I'm ready for that. It's going to be great, too. Let's do it. All right, Andy. Good to see you, buddy. Thanks for being here. Same here, man. Thank you. All right, that's it for the show. Thank you to Andy for being here and thank you as always for watching and listening. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings,

if you see one of these on the street, take a picture of it. Send it to me. Vergecasterge.com is the email. The hotline is 866Verge11. I want to hear all of your thoughts. If you want to take me for a ride also in your street legal rad golf cart, get at me. I'm ready for it. As a reminder, the best thing you can do to support all of this and to one day fund my own golf cart ambitions is to subscribe to The Verge.com/subscribe. It gets you all of our podcasts adree, including this one. It gets you all of our newsletters. It gets you all of our coverage of this space and everything else. The verge.com/subscribe. Thanks in advance. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media

Podcast Network. This episode is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kefir, and Travis Larch. We'll see you next time. Rock and roll.