Buying & owning the strangest electric car

great I don't care I want the car two years ago something like that I was looking for a new car to get something unusual something about five grand cuz that's about what I had to spend on another car and I was looking at something like maybe a Yugo maybe something weird like that maybe another communist D car like a lotta or something but at some point I decided there's a lot of off lease electric cars available I had around five thousand dollars there's tons of them on the market like Fiat 500e or smart II D 2013 is about the year that they were and I could get them four five seven grand I could even get Nissan Leafs for that price but I decided you know I don't want I don't want a Fiat that Fiat didn't want to make I don't want a smart named IDI so I want something a little bit weird it fits more into my personality and I would like it more so I known about this small electric car called a we go and they were made here in Georgia they weren't made here in Georgia they were made in California the headquarters is here in Georgia and the warehouse and everything so I knew those existed but the problem is the highway capable version of them they only made a hundred if that so they were extremely extremely hard to find and I thought well I'm never gonna find one of these things the reason I was familiar with them was because the town I grew up near was Mexico Missouri and there happened to be a car dealership that sold we goes there it's just in the middle of Central Missouri I think they sold like six of them and it was called M&M golf cart there's a golf cart dealership but I was visiting my parents one weekend and we drove through Mexico Missouri and there happened to be one sitting out on the edge of a lot of a heating and cooling place and not only was it just sitting there had a for sale sign in the window which was absolutely perfect so I ran up to the to the window the car wrote down the phone number and then went home I thought well I have to get this so I called the guy up and he bought it for a business car it was a heating and cooling place he said well I just wanted to something to run about town to go get estimates and stuff like that great I don't care I want the car and he said he wanted 7000 for it and I thought alright that's fine and we set up a time so I could go look at it and maybe buy the car and that date was exactly Earth Day I thought well that's fantastic I'll get my first electric car on Earth Day so the Friday before Earth Day rolled around and I get a call from the guy and he said all right I took the car on a test drive and there was it wasn't right it was cutting out weirdly it was it was having problems so I took it to the dealership that's close by a medium golf cart and they had a service it was still under warranty at this point within two months just for the battery but I had two bad battery cells in it so I got those replaced at the dealership before I even got the car and I thought well that's a little disappointing that this car broke before I even looked at it but it's fixed now under warranty so a couple of weekends later after it was fixed after was back from the dealership I went to go look at the car finally as soon as I opened the door no not seven thousand for this thing because I only had ten thousand miles on this thing but it looked like it had come straight out of the 90s and it had three hundred thousand miles on it the seats were ripped the the rubber trim was ripped there was a big gash in the bumper the taillights and headlight surrounds they were cloudy they were like crayon colored and this was a four year old car it been just sitting out in the Sun for four years and had turned this shade of crayon other things squeaked most hilarious test-drive of my life this thing was a piece of crap I mean when you accelerate it sounds like the front end is trying to separate itself from the car it has no power whatsoever even if it's even an electric car doesn't feel like it could possibly get up to highway speed and there's top speed limit at 65 but anyway got nowhere the test drive I took it back and I said about 4,500 boom I'm gonna be a shrewd negotiator and he said about 5,000 and that was the the price I paid for this thing now the reason this thing is such a pile of crap is because these we goes they weren't they weren't designed in-house they were designed in the body was designed to China it was sold as the Shuang hua Nobel in China which is a Chinese knockoff of the first generation smart car and we go not having any money to produce a car of their own they bought the body shells and then made them electric and put their own stuff in it but the problem is that the 90% of the car is the Chinese stuff so it could be a 300 horsepower electric car it could be a Tesla rival it's still a Chinese knockoff of a smart car to everyone that looks at it I remember reading an article that a we go not a strong one noble a we go was crushed in Germany because of copyright problems but we go seems to have made it out fine because you know they did build the car they're just putting electrical bits in it they want this Chinese shell and they had to make it passed USDOT crash ratings as well so it this shell had to be modified and like the headlights are different I think there's some extra crash absorbing structures and like the pillars and there's some padding on the pillars and they got some exemptions like they don't have to have a compound multistage airbag it's just it's gonna blow at full force at any speed stuff like that I highly doubt it would blow at all so I called up my insurance guy I told him what it was of course it didn't show up in their database doesn't exist to the rest of the world or even the United States hardly exists to Atlanta and after coming up with nothing on his end he said okay give me the VIN give me the power how many seats will come up with a manual quote on it so I forget what the original price was but I think for a couple of months I was paying like 240 dollars a month on insurance for this stupid little electric car and then later on I said this is stupid this is a worthless car that I'm paying outrageous insurance on we need to renegotiate that so I gave him the price that I paid for it not the ridiculous MSRP of 36 grand and it knocked it down to like 120 a month which was the substantial difference but after that it broke so I said we'll just knock this down to liability only because forget it if it dies in the wreck I probably will too I don't need big insurance on this thing it's broken a lot I've actually restored it a little bit I fixed the gash in the bumper I replaced the taillights the marker lights were atrociously cloudy I replaced those because we go is still around and I can still get parts from him I actually went to the warehouse there's one guy there thanks Brian he seems lonely because his job is maintaining a fleet of almost non-existent we goes and he mostly buys off retired state sales the company is since pivoted they're called autonomous fusion now they make self-driving car technologies thank god they're not making self-driving we goes there just using that as a test mule they had a low speed version before the high speed version just to make money from those sales to sell the high speed version but almost all of the owners of all of those cars are retirees because they had fixed income they had some money in the bank they could just buy the car they had the tax incentive in mind like seven thousand dollars in Missouri and they would just drive it around their retirement communities and they want don't leave word about gas and then they die and he buys them back in the factory he goes 100 miles on a charge it's more than the smart edie even does now it's more than a used leaf probably would I tested it on the highway full speed for as far as it would go with the air conditioner cranked all the way and I got eighty six miles of charge which I thought was pretty good if you go up a hill you could have a race with a loaded semi and the loaded semi would win I have trouble keeping it at 55 on hills even slight grades so I feel bad for people behind me or if I pull out to pass someone's going slow and then they speed up there's nothing I can do at that point I did have a guy very recently up in New Jersey he said they had a we go on the lot with dead battery so that means it is it's less than worthless you can't pay someone to give her this thing because the battery of replacement is $15,000 and he contacts me you like we goes you want to you want to buy this car I said how much I was expecting him to be like a grand maybe I was thinking huh I could just have it because it's it's kind of a treasure trove of electric car parts because they didn't they didn't make anything new in-house they just bought stuff off the shelf and a we go at a grand would be good you could put all this stuff out of it into another car but then he comes back to me with a window sticker he said this car was never sold and he wants MSRP for it thirty-six grand and by this time I think the tax incentives are probably gone by now even if they're not has a dead battery in it what am I gonna do what's anyone gonna do with this car so it's it's gonna just sit there and die forever it's really loud because the doors don't seal properly so you just hear wind noise and it's electric car you'd want quiet anyway I noticed while I was driving around that the air conditioning wasn't working well it would it would get it down to about 80 inside and then the air conditioner would shut off so it was working up until that point but it was like the temperature resolved I had it all the way on the cold side so later on when I visited the we go warehouse I mentioned this problem to the guy there and he is just he was just a knowledge hole for all of these things and he said well your potentiometers probably because this this knob is just backed by a rotary potentiometer and he turned me on to the diagnostic mode that you can put the car on you just hold the odometer stock while you're turning it on and it shows readouts of everything so it showed the knob reading out when it's set to all the way cold it was set to like 86 degrees so what I had to do to fix this was take the whole Knobble assembly off take the rotary potentiometer off the back of it rotate it so that the physical stop on the knob mat matched up with the physical stop on the rotary potentiometer and now I have full air conditioning but if I set it all the way down it's at 68 degrees which is what it should be I turn it up one little tiny notch still at 68 one more notch 74 if I go one more notch it goes all the way up to like 86 or something so it's still way into the cold side and it's set to 86 so you just have to know how that that knob works but I've had the car for one and a half years now I absolutely love it it's one of them my favorite cars in my fleet my small fleet and I it's just drivable comic relief at this point I absolutely love that thing [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 325,226

Rating: 4.5999289 out of 5

Keywords: Wheego, LiFe, Whip, Missouri, Aging Wheels, Robert Dunn, VINwiki, Car Stories, Electric Cars, Noble, Leaf, Nissan, Range, YouTuber, Atlanta, battery pack, Interview, car buying, Shrewd Negotiation, Satire, Funny, Doug Demuro, T-shirt, Smart Car, Fiat, Smart ED, 500e, Tesla, Competition, Comparisson

Id: mt2Irs0Sa2g

Length: 11min 42sec (702 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 12 2018