Are electric micro-cars, NEVs, and LSVs street-legal in the US? Here’s how to know
In Part 1 of this series titled “Everything you need to know about electric micro-cars, NEVs, LSVs, & golf carts,” we discussed the various categories of micro-cars, neighborhood electric vehicles (NEVs), low-speed vehicles (LSVs), and golf carts. We also covered how these vehicles are becoming such popular car alternatives for so many people. Now in Part 2, we’ll dive into the important topic of what makes these vehicles street-legal for use on public roads.
As we discussed in Part 1 of this series, the term LSV (or low-speed vehicle) is the only important consideration here, as “NEV” is merely a colloquial nickname. The term LSV, on the other hand, is codified into law by the US Department of Transportation and is a federally recognized category of motor vehicles by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
That’s the key to making many of these tiny cars street-legal for use on public roads, though the downside of that is you’ll probably have to register, tag, and insure your LSV in most states in the US.
One point should be made extremely clear though: In almost every case, the question of whether or not an LSV is street-legal comes down to its manufacturer, not to you as the owner or driver. Outside of a few specific cases in a minority of cities and states, non-street-legal LSVs can not be modified or turned into street-legal LSVs by their owners. They need to be originally manufactured to meet federal regulatory guidelines.
Okay, now let’s talk about those guidelines (and some of the exceptions).
Federal regulation of low-speed vehicles
In order for LSVs to be considered for sale in the US to be used on public roads, they must be produced to meet federal regulations for LSVs. This means that they must be designed and manufactured from the outset for street-legal use.
The first step is ensuring that the factory is registered with the NHTSA. Before buying an LSV, you should always ask the vendor if the vehicles are registered with the NHTSA. If the answer is “don’t worry about it, they only go 25 mph,” then 99 out of 100 times you’re not looking at a street-legal LSV.
Without this critical step of being registered and approved as an LSV manufacturer by the NHTSA, proper VINs (vehicle identification numbers) can not be assigned to the vehicles for registration. A VIN that conforms to the same rules as those used on all street-legal vehicles in the US – including full-size cars and trucks for highway use – is just one of more than a dozen federal requirements for LSVs.
This is the step that most foreign-manufactured and imported LSVs miss, since very few overseas LSV factories are actually registered with the NHTSA, meaning they can’t offer a US VIN code. Chinese micro-cars that are imported to the US often have VINs on the frame, but they are Chinese VINs. That’s the case with my internet-famous mini-truck from China. It has a VIN, but it means nothing in the US since it’s a Chinese VIN.
Next, there are several other requirements that mimic those for full-size cars, from visibility to safety equipment. Low-speed vehicles must have backup cameras with very specific viewing angle requirements. Again, these are the same requirements used for full-size cars and trucks in the US. Slapping a camera on the back of a micro-car or golf cart isn’t enough to fulfill this requirement.
Other requirements like pedestrian warning systems (also referred to as pedestrian noisemakers) are required for LSVs with electric drivetrains. Once again, these have the exact same requirements as for new electric cars like Teslas, etc. Very specific octave levels and decibels levels must be programmed into the car’s noisemaker to warn pedestrians, especially vision-impaired pedestrians, of the vehicle’s presence. The sound must reach certain pitches at different speeds and must modulate as the vehicle’s speed increases and decreases. The exact regulation text for just the pedestrian noisemaker is dozens of pages long, believe it or not.
These are some of the more difficult and cumbersome regulations applied to LSVs since they share the same rules as existing cars, but they’re not the only ones. LSVs must also have lap belts or 3-point seat belts that meet DOT requirements for full-size cars as well as windshields that use specific DOT-approved glazing. Both the windshields and the seat belts must be produced by suppliers that are already registered with the DOT. Simply installing any basic seat belt isn’t enough.
Other requirements cover aspects related to lighting, braking systems, reflectors, mirrors, and more.
Where LSVs differ in street-legal requirements from full-size cars largely comes down to the more complicated safety requirements. Crumple zones, airbags, radar, and other major pieces of safety equipment aren’t required in LSVs, and the vehicles themselves aren’t required to undergo crash testing. If they were, the results likely wouldn’t be pretty due to the reduced safety equipment in the vehicles.
That’s one of the reasons that LSVs are limited to just 25 mph (40 km/h) top speed and can only be operated on roads with speed limits of 35 mph (56 km/h). Both of these are part of the federally mandated LSV regulations and are designed to prevent these vehicles from mixing with larger full-size vehicles at higher speeds, where the result of crashes are more likely to be fatal.
Some cities and states have more lax LSV laws
The above is not a complete list of the regulations for LSVs, but paints a picture of the somewhat complicated path required for companies to meet the federal regulations related to LSVs.
However, these are just the federal regulations. Most states describe low-speed vehicles in their state highway codes and have a section deferring regulations to match those at the federal level. In other words, they use the federal rules for LSVs in their own states. A few states set aside more strict requirements, while a few states offer more lenient requirements.
While the vast majority of US states use the federal rules for LSVs, Colorado is an example one state that sets its own more lenient rules that remit several of the more complicated manufacturing requirements. This makes it easier to register things like golf carts as LSVs, though this case is a rare one in the US.
Are golf carts street-legal too?
No, golf carts almost always not street-legal. This is true in nearly every city and state in the US.
Are there exceptions to this rule? Absolutely. But they usually only occur at the local level. That means a state, city, or township has to create a specific ordinance allowing for golf carts to be operated on public roads. There are a few towns that have become famous for this, such as Peachtree City in Georgia, but they are a minority.
To determine if golf carts are considered street-legal and can be used on public roads in your area, you should check with your local police department or Department of Motor Vehicles.
The only time that golf carts do meet federal standards for LSVs is when they are specifically produced as LSV golf carts. Most major golf cart manufacturers in the US do in fact produce LSV versions of their golf carts, meaning they were designed to meet federal low-speed vehicle regulations. The problem is that many have yet to update those models to the most recent version of LSV regulations, which added backup cameras and pedestrian noisemakers to the list of required equipment only a few years ago.
While many LSV golf carts have added backup cameras, most still lack a pedestrian warning system. In reality, you’ll likely never actually get cited by a cop for operating an LSV golf cart that doesn’t have a pedestrian warning system in it, mostly because very few cops would even know that they require one. But if you want to know the letter of the law, then without meeting full compliance, such LSV golf carts aren’t technically street-legal. And when it comes time to register the LSV, it may not be possible without the complete suite of required equipment.
Beware of unscrupulous dealers claiming ‘street-legal’ status
As LSVs have become more popular in the US, so too have shady vendors purporting to sell street-legal LSVs.
Most, if not all, are imported Chinese models that were designed for the Chinese market. Ironically, they aren’t even technically street-legal in China since there are no equivalent LSV laws in China. But they are still commonly used by elderly drivers in China where their name loosely translates to “happy grandpa” cars.
These Chinese models have begun being imported to the US in larger numbers. Models marketed as “Chang Li” vehicles are one of the most common, though Chang Li is simply a single manufacturer and most “Chang Li” vehicles in the US aren’t even produced by Chang Li. At this time, no Chang Li vehicle is street-legal in the US as they do not meet federal regulatory standards for LSVs.
These vehicles lack many of the requirements for street-legal LSV status, usually relating to DOT-stamped safety glass, pedestrian warning systems, proper lighting, DOT-certified seat belts, and other important details. Perhaps most critically, these vehicles do not feature NHTSA-compliant VIN (vehicle identification number) codes. While many come with a VIN, they are actually Chinese VINs and can not be found in the NHTSA database because the manufacturer is not registered with the US government to produce cars for export to the US.
These non-compliance issues haven’t stopped many of shady US resellers from hawking such vehicles with claims of “street-legal” plastered over their websites and marketing materials. But the fact is that nearly no Chinese-manufactured LSVs, NEVs, or micro-cars are currently street-legal in the US, unless they fit into certain city or state laws that have a looser set of requirements than federal low-speed vehicle laws. In fact, at the time of writing, I know of only two Chinese-manufactured LSVs that are currently street-legal in the US, the Wink and the Pickman. And in the case of the Wink, which I know more about after having tested them myself, that’s only because the company spent nearly two years designing the vehicles to be produced in China to US safety standards and properly registered their factory with the NHTSA.
What street-legal LSVs and golf carts exist in the US?
While the category is still in its infancy, there are already several options for street-legal LSVs in the US. Some are already on the road, while others are expected to enter the market later this year.
We will cover these options in detail Part 3 of this series, which will be coming later this week.
Stay tuned!
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In a high-tech move that we can all get behind and isn’t dystopian at all, the City of Barcelona is feeding camera data from its city buses into an advanced AI, but they swear they’re not using the footage to to issue tickets to bad drivers. Yet.
Barcelona and its Ring Roads Low Emission Zone have earned lots of fans by limiting ICE traffic in the city’s core. The city’s latest idea to promote mass transit is the deployment of an artificial intelligence system developed by Hayden AI for automatic enforcement of reserved lanes and stops to improve bus circulation – but while it seems to be working as intended, it’s raising entirely different questions.
“Bus lanes are designed to help deliver reliable, fast, and convenient public transport service. But private vehicles illegally using bus lanes make this impossible,” explains Laia Bonet, First Deputy Mayor, Area for Urban Planning, Ecological Transition, Urban Services and Housing at the Ajuntament de Barcelona. “We are excited to partner with Hayden AI to learn where these problems occur and how they are impacting our public transport service.”
Currently operating as a pilot program on the city’s H12 and D20 bus lines, the system uses cameras installed on the city’s electric buses to detect vehicles that commit static violations in the bus lanes and stops (read: stopping or parking where you shouldn’t). The Hayden AI system then analyses that data and provides statistical information on what it captures while the bus is driving along on its daily route.
Hayden AI says that, while it photographs and records video sequences and collects contextual information of the violation, its cameras do not record license plates or people and no penalties are being issued to drivers or owners of the vehicles.
So far so good, right? But it’s what happens once the six mont pilot is over that seems like it should be setting off alarm bells.
Big Brother Bus is watching
The footage is manually reviewed by a Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB) officer, who reportedly reviewed some 2,500 violations identified by AI in May alone. But, while the system isn’t being used to issue violations during the pilot program, it easily could.
And, in fact, it already has … and the AI f@#ked up royally.
AI writes thousands of bad tickets
When AI was given the ability to issue citations in New York City earlier this year, it wrote more than 290,000 tickets (that’s right: two-hundred and ninety thousand) in just three months, generating nearly $21 million in revenue for the city. The was just one problem: thousands of those drivers weren’t doing anything wrong.
What’s more, the photos generated by the AI powered cameras were supposed to be approved only after being verified by a human, but either that didn’t happen, or it did happen and the human operator in question wasn’t paying attention, or (maybe the worst possibility) the violations were mistakes or hallucinations, and the human checker couldn’t tell the difference.
In OpenAI’s tests of its newest o3 and o4-mini reasoning models, the company found the o3 model hallucinated 33% of the time during its PersonQA tests, in which the bot is asked questions about public figures. When asked short fact-based questions in the company’s SimpleQA tests, OpenAI said o3 hallucinated 51% of the time. The o4-mini model fared even worse: It hallucinated 41% of the time during the PersonQA test and 79% of the time in the SimpleQA test, though OpenAI said its worse performance was expected as it is a smaller model designed to be faster. OpenAI’s latest update to ChatGPT, GPT-4.5, hallucinates less than its o3 and o4-mini models. The company said when GPT-4.5 was released in February the model has a hallucination rate of 37.1% for its SimpleQA test.
I don’t know about you guys, but if we had a local traffic cop that got it wrong 33% of the time (at best), I’d be surprised if they kept their job for very long. But AI? AI has a multibillion dollar hype train and armies of undereducated believers talking about singularities and building themselves blonde robots with boobs. And once the AI starts issuing tickets to the AI that’s driving your robotaxi, it can just call its buddy AI the bank to send over your money. No human necessary, at any point, and the economy keeps on humming.
But, like – I’m sure that’s fine. Embrace the future and all that … right?
SOURCES: Hayden AI, via Forbes, Motorpasión.
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A new report from global energy think tank Ember says batteries have officially hit the price point that lets solar power deliver affordable electricity almost every hour of the year in the sunniest parts of the world.
The study looked at hourly solar data from 12 cities and found that in sun-soaked places like Las Vegas, you could pair 6 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels with 17 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of batteries and get a steady 1 GW of power nearly 24/7. The cost? Just $104 per megawatt-hour (MWh) based on average global prices for solar and batteries in 2024. That’s a 22% drop in a year and cheaper than new coal ($118/MWh) and nuclear ($182/MWh) in many regions.
Ember calls it “24/365 solar generation,” and it’s not just a theoretical model. Cities like Muscat, Oman, and Las Vegas can hit that steady power mark for up to 99% of the hours in a year. Hyderabad, Madrid, and Buenos Aires can reach 80–95% of the way there using that same solar-plus-storage setup with some cloud cover. And even cloudier cities like Birmingham in the UK can cover about 62% of hours annually.
“This is a turning point in the clean energy transition,” said Kostantsa Rangelova, global electricity analyst at Ember. “Around-the-clock solar is no longer a distant dream; it’s an economic reality of the world. It unlocks game-changing opportunities for energy-hungry industries like data centres and manufacturing.”
This is an enormous opportunity for sunny regions in Africa and Latin America. Manufacturers and data centers could also tap into solar-plus-storage and skip long waits (and big bills) for new grid connections.
It’s not a silver bullet for grid-wide reliability, but it lets solar carry much more of the load, especially where sunshine is abundant. Batteries also help avoid costly grid expansions by allowing up to five times more solar to plug into existing connections.
In 2024 alone, global battery prices dropped 40%, which helped drive down solar-plus-storage costs by 22%. Record-low tenders from countries like Saudi Arabia point to even cheaper options coming soon.
Real-world projects are already online: The UAE built the world’s first gigawatt-scale 24-hour solar facility. Arizona is already home to solar-powered data centers. And as battery tech keeps improving, round-the-clock solar could become the backbone of clean energy systems in the world’s sunniest places.
Read more: This solar canopy cools wastewater and powers a city utility
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The Honda Prologue continues to surprise, ranking among the top ten most leased vehicles (gas-powered or EV) in the US in the first quarter. It was the only EV, outside of Tesla’s Model Y and Model 3, that made the list.
Honda Prologue EV ranks among most leased vehicles
After launching the Prologue in the US last March, Honda’s electric SUV took off. In the second half of the year, it was the second-best-selling electric SUV, trailing only the Tesla Model Y.
The Prologue remains a top-selling EV in the US this year, with over 13,500 units sold through May. That’s not too bad, considering it only sold 705 through May of last year.
According to a new Experian report (via Automotive News), Honda’s success is being driven by ultra-affordable lease rates. In the first quarter, nearly 60% of new EV buyers in the US chose to lease, up from just 36% a year ago.
Three EVs ranked in the top ten most leased vehicles, including the Tesla Model Y, Model 3, and Honda Prologue.
Tesla’s Model Y and Model 3 took the top two spots, while the Honda Prologue ranked number seven. Those who leased Tesla’s Model 3 paid $402 per month, Honda Prologue lessees paid $486 a month.
Given the average loan rate was $708 a month for those who bought it, it’s no wonder nearly 90% chose to lease. Under 9% chose to buy, while less than 2% paid cash.
The discounts are piling up, but for how long?
To give you a better idea, the average monthly payment for a new vehicle lease in the US in the first quarter was $595.
With over $20,000 in discounts, Honda’s luxury Acura brand is selling a surprising number of EVs in the US. The nearly $65,000 Acura ZDX is sold for under $40,000 on average in May, according to Cox Automotive’s EV Market Monitor report for May.
The trend is primarily thanks to the $7,500 federal EV tax credit, which is being passed on to customers through leasing.
With the Trump administration and Senate Republicans aiming to kill off federal subsidies, the savings could soon disappear. If the Senate’s recently proposed bill is passed, the $7,500 credit would expire within 180 days. It would not only make electric vehicles more expensive, but it would also put the US further behind China and others leading the shift to electrification.
Some automakers, including GM, are expected to continue offering the incentives. “GM has been very competitive on the incentives on their end, and that is not scheduled to end.”
After outselling Ford, GM’s Chevy is now the fastest-growing EV brand in the US through May. Chevy is starting to chip away at Tesla’s lead, largely thanks to the new Equinox EV, or “America’s most affordable +315 range EV,” as GM calls it.
According to Xperian, those who leased a new Chevy Equinox EV in Q1 paid $243 less than those who financed it. The electric Equinox stood out in Cox Automotive’s EV Market Monitor report with an average selling price under $40,000, even without incentives.
The Chevy Equinox EV remains one of the most affordable EVs on the market. Starting at just $34,995, the base LT FWD model offers an EPA-estimated range of 319 miles.
Looking to test out some of the most popular EVs for yourself? With Honda Prologue leases as low as $259 per month and Chevy Equinox EV leases starting at just $289 per month, the deals are hard to pass up right now while the incentives are still here. You can use our links below to find models in your area.
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