'City One' EV by Adaptive City Mobility (ACM)

[Ivan Leon]

The Best New Electric Car Is A Tiny Little Beast That Can Swap Batteries In 3 Minutes - Jalopnik​

The City One looks like a cross between a Honda Element, Citroën 2CV, and a Halliburton Briefcase​

Almost all the mainstream EVs on the market are sleek, fast, high-tech-looking things with operating ranges of about 200 miles or more.

And while all of those are desirable traits, they don’t really do you a hell of a lot of good when you’re crawling through city traffic at 27 mph or stuck at a charger for 45 minutes.

Sometimes the less obvious way can prove to be a better way, and I think this small German company, ACM, may have realized that with their charmingly industrial-looking little battery-swappable EV, the City One.

The City One is designed like a Japanese Kei-type “tall boy” small car—small exterior dimensions, with a tall, boxy body to maximize interior space.

Adaptive City Mobility (ACM) designed the car (which is actually a bit bigger than Kei-class dimensions, at 141.7 inches long) to be a sort of multi-purpose, primarily city transportation tool, capable of being used as a taxi, shared-use car, small delivery van, and as a general passenger car.

Here, watch a video about it:

It can hold five passengers plus 14 cubic feet of luggage or can be a little van with over 51 cubic feet of cargo room; that’s about half as much as a Ford Transit Connect van, which is pretty good for such a little vehicle.

What I think really makes this little EV so interesting is how it handles its batteries and recharging. There’s a primary battery in the car that I think is mounted flat under the floor, the now-standard EV skateboard approach, but there are also four slots under the rear cargo floor that can take 2.5 kWh battery modules, each weighing just over 23 pounds.

The Best New Electric Car Is A Tiny Little Beast That Can Swap Batteries In 3 Minutes

The City One looks like a cross between a Honda Element, Citroën 2CV, and a Halliburton Briefcase

jalopnik.com