Ever wondered what would happen if a scooter and a suitcase would procreate? Unless you have a very active (and strange) imagination, probably not. Still, that is pretty much exactly what the Boxx Scooter seems to be. The oddly designed scooter is built by Oregon-based Boxx, is about 39-inches long, and promises to move you up to 80 miles (or 129 km) on a single charge. The scooter is also capable of up to 35 mph.  Unfortunately, strange suitcase-scooter hybrids apparently don’t come cheap, and this unique electric scooter runs in at just $4,000 for a base model. In fact, in order to get the boasted 80-mile range, you need to have the extra “Core2” system battery, which adds another $500 to the price tag.

If you don’t want one now, but might in the future, you can pre-order for a later production run and save $255 on the total cost of the bike. For most of us, the price is probably a turn off, but for those who really need a short-range traveling unit like this, who knows? I do know a friend that used to manage a small convenient station that lived only three miles from work and would ride a scooter back and forth. He looked a bit silly, but saved a fortune in gas versus a car. Of course he only paid around $600 for his old, beat-up scooter. The BOXX was first introduced just last week at the Portland International Auto Show, designed by founder Eric Vaughn. Before his days at BOXX, Vaughn actually worked in television as a visual designer for the series Stargate. If the BOXX looks a bit dorky (and bizarre), Vaughn says it’s meant to be that way, though he doesn’t specifically call it that. The idea of the unit is to attract a wider array of riders, including women and seniors. Vaughn is taking orders right now at his website.

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For those of you who want to save the Earth by using electric cars and scooters, new models have been launched by New York’s evolve motorcycles.

All the new models come with lithium-ion batteries, feature the latest electrical and charging technologies and come with a one year roadside assistance warranty all the while reaching speeds between 60 and 70 miles per hour. That’s the spec on their speedy Titanium models, you can also slow it down to 40 mph for the lightest models in their scooter line.

The scooter users will also soon have an application aimed for iOS devices (and will later be available for other mobile operating systems) that will allow riders to record their journeys, upload photos and videos and locate other evolve riders as well as close charging stations. Information on the bike’s performance can also be accessed through the same application.

The most expensive scooter, the Titanium model, starts at $5,400 USD and features a 5,000 watt electric motor and a battery that can fully charge in just 2.5 hours. The neon model will start at $3,900 and sports a 3,000 watt motor that allows a top speed of 50 mph.

While all the models are currently available for pre-order, shipping will oddly start in early December.

[GizMag via Evovle Motorcycles]

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Believe it or not, this vehicle really has nothing to do with the golden arches and you probably won’t be able to super size it with a Diet Coke. Strange name aside, the Geely McCar might actually provide a novel solution to the urban commuter.

You see, it’s not just a car; it’s also an electric scooter… sort of. The Geely McCar (short for Magic Car) will look not unlike the Fiat 500 or Toyota Yaris from the outside, but this two-door ultracompact has a built-in folding three-wheel scooter out the back.

The car itself (being proposed as either a hybrid or a full electric) will seat four people and when it is on the road, the car will share its juice to keep the scooter charged up for when you need it. I imagine this could be great for carpooling if one out of the three passengers, not including the driver, has to go somewhere else.

I don’t think a Geely McCar would fly in North America, but slap on the recently acquired Volvo brand name to go with a new model name and you could have a winner for urban commuters. Assuming, of course, that the Big Mac population isn’t too fat to weigh down the McScooter that comes as part of the McCar. You’ll also probably have to stop and do a bit of manual undocking to get the scooter apart, rather than an in-transit transformer-like separation as we may have hoped for.

[Read]

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It’s not exactly practical to bring along your Vespa when you happen to be flying across the country. What if you could still have a scooter to take with you, though? What if it fit inside a suitcase for ease of transport? And what if it was almost entirely green too?

That’s fundamentally the idea dreamed up by one Terry Hope, the guy who has created what he calls the Kinetic Photovoltaic Vehicle (KPV). It’s a scooter that can be collapsed to fit inside a suitcase, but it also comes wrapped up with a series of solar panels for extra power on the go. If you do plug it into the wall, it’ll juice up in 15 or 45 minutes for 13 miles range.

This is totally a one-off project, but the current version sees a 396 W-h/24-volt battery, 28 W-h/12-volt booster battery, 10.8-volt ultracapacitor bank and a 12-volt kinetic generator, along with the 50-watt solar array with 14 monocrystalline cells across five panels. The 44 pound KPV can travel up to 20mph, but that’s obviously dependent on the heft of the driver too.

It’s a pretty neat contraption, albeit crude in appearance. Version 2 of the KPV will likely be more polished with lights, laser guidance, and a 7-inch tablet-esque display with WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, and 3G/4G connectivity.

[GizMag via KPV]

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Honda will start leasing its EV-neo Electric Scooter on Friday, December 24, 2010 to select businesses in Japan. They are leasing 100 scooters as part of a government-backed program to collect data about the scooters. The EV-neo can go for 34 km before needing to be recharged, which Honda measured at a constant speed of 30 km/h on a level road. The scooter is being marketed for delivery services.

To save the pizza delivery guy from a charge time of about four hours with the portable 100V charger that comes with the scooter, Honda has developed a quick charger exclusively for the EV-neo, which can fully charge the scooter in 30 minutes. They are also part of the pilot program for the recently announced Honda EV charging stations in Japan.

Honda promotes the scooter as green, clean and quiet. It’s so quiet that there is an optional pedestrian alert system on the scooter to warn pedestrians that the pizza delivery guy is hot on their heels. The base price of the scooter with tax is about $5900 US. The scooter with the quick charger is about $6850 US. Honda hopes to start lease sales of the EV-neo to general businesses and individual business owners in April 2011.

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