It was supposed to come yesterday, but there was a big wind storm and the guy who sold me the car is an electrician on an island and had to run around starting generators for all the people who lost power.

 

But today it finally came. It was riding on the back of a little trailer, with only a couple inches of clearance front and back, and no way to open the doors on the sides, so we had to pull it out and hope we could handle the weight on the slope of the trailer tailgate. Luckily it is a light car, so we had no problems.

 

As you can tell, the car is quite dirty on the outside, but the few spots that are clean look really nice so I have high hopes that it will clean up with a little bit of soap and water.

 

The car doesn’t currently run because the 12v battery is dead and that is used to energize all the controls. So I was a bit surprised when I tried turning the key and pressing the gas and the car lurched forward. It only did it the once so either I broke something, or the little energy left in the system had just enough juice to run once. I ordered the service manual on Sunday and it is supposed to arrive tomorrow along with some multi-testers so hopefully I can trace out everything and get it all working.

 

After getting the car, I suddenly realized that I hadn’t checked on insurance and some people with electric cars have had trouble getting normal insurance. So I called my insurance company (Pemco). It turns out that they don’t insure electric cars except from the major auto manufacturers--not that any of those are producing new ones right now.

 

I had seen from the EV forums that AllState might be able to insure it. I called them and they had no problem with insuring it, but they will only do it if they also insure our other cars. They are more expensive than our current insurance and it would split our car and home insurance (or we would have to move everything over).

 

AllState mentioned that they sometimes work with Haggerty--a specialty collector’s car insurance company. Haggerty won’t insure a ComutaCar (not cool enough apparently) but it does look like another company might: American Collectors Insurance. I tried to call them, but they close at 4:30pm Eastern and it was already 3pm Pacific, so I’ve contacted an insurance broker to have them find out.