One of the most infamously irredeemable cars sold in the United States in the 21st century came from the electric startup Wheego. In a back corner of a dealership that once was the main Wheego distributor for Georgia, a few forlorn cars still sit unsold, complete with window stickers.
This pack of moldering Wheegos are all Whips, the 40-mile range version of their debut vehicle. A (supposedly) 100-mile range version was sold as the LiFe, named for its more potent lithium-ion phosphate battery chemistry. The miniscule range wasn’t the Whip’s biggest problem as it had a top speed of a mere 35 mph (25 mph in some states); the LiFe could supposedly muster a blistering 65 mph.
To understand how Wheego managed to create one of the least appealing vehicles of the century, we need to rewind. This is Georgia Wheego in mid 2013, as seen by Google Streetview. That’s the same year the last new Wheego was delivered to dealers. Wheego itself was founded in 2009 and began selling Whips sometime around 2011. In those two years, approximately 300 Whips were sold. The Wheego LiFe, essentially the same car with better batteries, was significantly more expensive and around 100 made it out of the the factory.
Even in their metaphorical backyard, these cars were very rare sights. My only experience with a Wheego that wasn’t these hopelessly moldy heaps came years ago; I saw a LiFe on the downtown connector in Atlanta, of all places, and was deeply puzzled as to what I was looking at. It took years to discover what I saw. This official Wheego video of a LiFe zipping around those same streets gives better context for that encounter than the unsellable shame at the back of a dealership we opened with.
The very first thing anyone will notice about these unusual vehicles is their resemblance to the Smart Fortwo. It wasn’t Wheego that cribbed the car’s derivative lines, but Chinese automaker Shuanghuan with their copycat Noble city car. The Whip and LiFe were EV versions of the Noble, sold in China as the E-Noble and imported to the US.
These brand-new Whip interiors have been mercilessly attacked by mold. The white one was the only example that wasn’t a serious hazard to my health. Nevertheless, it sports some un-new car-like mold growth.
The interior is all Shuanghuan Noble, complete with goofy air vent pods on the top of the dashboard. The materials are cheap and flimsy, but the design isn’t as amateur as you might expect from a Chinese car that debuted in 2004. It was a bit dated in here by the time Wheego peddled these in 2011, but even 14 years ago standards for small cars were much lower. Surprisingly, the original Chinese-built gasoline version was built until 2016.
This spiral bound owner’s manual does not inspire confidence. The design of the spreads was reasonable, but the lack of proper binding is a poor look for such an expensive purchase.
The original window sticker on the white Whip, equipped with the $1,995 optional air conditioning, was a shocking $21,990. That’s $31,946.37 today; since these are brand new unsold cars, it’s presumed the original MSRP still holds true, to the extent these are even still saleable. Undoubtedly the lead acid batteries have all died from sitting so long without a charge.
Wheego Technologies is rumored to still be around as an automotive software research company working on self-driving cars, the latest hot new thing after EVs. However, with a website that appears to have been last updated in 2015, it’s unclear whether they’re still solvent. Either way, it’s highly unlikely these brand new vehicles still have a warranty.
For as bad as the LiFe was, our featured Curbside Classics are Whips, which were so much worse. Their aforementioned $21,990 MSRP wasn’t their worst feature. For one, it took a best-case 10 hours to charge up its nominal 40-mile range when new. Since the batteries were lead acid, they almost certainly hemorrhaged range rapidly if any more than 50% or so of that range was actually used. Drivers of lead acid battery cars that didn’t know how to baby the cells could kill them in months, even weeks.
The LiFes didn’t have the same tendency for battery degradation under normal use as with its 30 kWh lithium ion phosphate batterry pack. However, with the Life’s sticker price starting at $32,995 ($47,164.44 today), it was simply too expensive for a Chinese copycat city car from a fly by night startup. That price almost made the Whip look like a good deal.
The high price of the LiFe and its accompanying dubious quality combined with the serious usability compromises of the still pricey Whip weren’t enough to make this ambitious vehicle one of the worst vehicles of all time. What really makes this car drown in its own hubris is the arrival of the Nissan Leaf in the American market in 2011, the same year Wheego launched their electrified Shuanghuan Noble.
In its launch month of January of 2011, Nissan had already sold more than twice as many Leafs than Wheego sold cars in the entire year. Sure, the Leaf cost a heady $32,780, but it was a proper car from an established OEM and not a then 7 year old Chinese knockoff electrified by a third party. Once you added air conditioning to your LiFe, the Leaf gave you four doors, was bigger, more luxurious, and had equivalent real-world range for a mere $200 more. Wheegos looked like the punchline to a bad joke in comparison.
If Wheego will be remembered at all, it will be for its myriad flaws and limitations. The story of Wheego is not unlike that of ZAP, which preceded it by a few years by also selling Chinese EVs, in this case much cruder three wheelers and also with fragile lead acid batteries. ZAP actually claimed it would be selling an electrified (genuine) Smart, but it collapsed before that ever happened.
Unlike many proposed EV startups, Wheego did actually bring its car to market, but it only reached customers after it became completely irrelevant. This interesting footnote in American automotive history is essentially extinct on the road and is unlikely to ever show up in private collections; this grouping of four brand new, unsold Whips is the closest we’ll get to the shiny Wheego press photos now.
Maybe you’d like to buy one of these rare collectibles? They’re undoubtedly still there (seen here from a Google street view in August 2024, in the upper right hand corner) at Grand Motorcars, 1794 Roswell Road, Marietta, GA 30062; (678) 263-7373. Maybe it’s better if you don’t tell them I sent you.
Related CC reading:
Curbside Classic/Review: Zap Xebra – The Justified Assassination
At the right price, this might make an interesting lawn ornament. The range is pathetic. A 1916 Woods Electric with conventional batteries of the time had a range of 60 miles. On the other hand, what a great vehicle for a young man. Pull up to your girlfriend’s house in this and let’s see if she will go out with you. Great essay. A Smart Car on downers.
I wasn’t sure, until I saw the (770) area code on the showroom window, whether these were in Georgia (USA) or Georgia (the country).
From a use-case standpoint, these would seem to be more aligned with battery golf carts than for use even as an inner-city vehicle.
Unlike traditional low speed electric vehicles like golf carts, these medium speed vehicles like the Whips have VINS and proper license plates. They’re just not fast enough to go on higher speed roads.
Meanwhile, the LiFes were proper cars, just really bad ones. There wasn’t legally much difference between them other than the Whips couldn’t make the minimum speed for some roads.
Wow, it makes the Mitsubishi i-MIEV look like a Lexus!
It’s interesting to see how much the electric car landscape has changed in 15 years.
You know, after a lot of people have thrown a lot of money at their development. We’ve made great strides in the puny performance of electric cars, taken some big steps in their mediocre range, and all we had to do was increase their price threefold!
I sound cynical but I really do believe in the electric dream — they just need to cook for another fifteen years. Gray, please repost this article in 2039 so I can re-read this comment.
Ask the dealer to make a donation of one of the Weego to the lane Motor Car Musuem as they specialize in micro-cars and oddball vehicles. Here’s the link: http://www.lanemotormuseum.org
It’s funny to see these as I have a fair amount of wheel time in an “real” electric Smart ED – was that badge purposely chosen to embarrass any male drivers, btw? I thought the Snart’s range of 60 miles (40 something in winter) was limiting…
Quite the unexpected finds. I’d long suppressed any lingering memories of Wheego and some of the other EV startups of the early EV era. My experiences covering XAP made me highly suspicious of them all. They were BS stock manipulators (or hoping to be).
The ironic thing is that it’s still going on: Fisker’s second coming was so obviously going to fail (which of course it did) and it’s going to leave a lot of very unhappy folks who were dumb enough to buy one. Their value has of course plummeted, but worse than that, the cars have very buggy software and there will be no one to fix that or anything else.
Will we find four Fisker Oceans sitting moldering away in the far corner of a dealer storage lot in 2038?
While Oceans are ticking time bombs of unrepairability, they are useful as cars when they actually work. The Wheegos? Not so much. It would be easier to sell a leftover Fisker based on “it’s so nice. . . . . for now. . .” but you’d have to be pretty delusional to drive a Wheego and think it was good enough to spend your actual real money on. I’m sure some will end up getting lost in the corporate chaos though. I think the chances of literally no one wanting to touch them with a 10 foot pole until they’re 14 year old new cars is less likely.
That’s a great find. The host of the “Aging Wheels” has a love/hate (mostly hate) relationship with these little things; his videos are a good source for more information.
With such low range, it should target the farm, park and golf course vehicle market, or even use in those e-commerce large warehouse. I recalled there were many tries from various auto manufacturers starting with GM EV1 (my work place had one), Toyota RAV4, later GM bought in its Opel power by fuel cell, Honda had one burning hydrogen. No long ago, Smart sold electric power car so as Fiat 500 (my relative in LA had one because of large initiatives from Chrysler and governments). Then Tesla brought us its little roaster based on Lotus, followed by its type S.
EV has been in high gear until last six months. People switch back to fossil fuel, or fuel /electric hybrid. All seems Toyota has the last laugh. And the Chinese car makers we laughed at and continue laughing at now produce millions of EV annually and is the leader of EV traction batteries. The US solution to Chinese EV is to make as national security, geopolitical, economic and presidential election issues while throwing the global warming out of the window. Biden just imposed 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs.
Even it has a upper hand in hybrid, Toyota still pushes its fuel cell cars in US with a large discount. Again I know someone has one in LA, he said it was generally good with range over three hundred miles, but fill up hydrogen taking up long time, he normally goes Longo Toyota for fill-up. If there is in front of his, he needs to wait for another 20 minutes before he can do fill-up?!.
I was in Japan the past summer, I saw a lot of kei cars running around. But all of them were powered by internal combustion engine, would it be better to use batteries? I know Japanese auto makers are not warm with electric motors even its companies produce excellent electric motors.