ZENN Cars Perfect for City-Dwellers: Zero Emissions, No Noise!

Haven’t yet heard of Toronto-based ZENN Motor Company (TSX: ZNN)? I hadn’t either until two days ago. Honda Schmonda and the fuel-cell cars that are only available in SoCal. You can buy your ZENN car (that stands for Zero Emissions, No Noise) in Oak Forest, IL, Bozeman, MT and Fayetteville, NC. And pretty much everywhere in between (unfortunately, they’re not yet available in Canada, even though they’re a Canadian company – ironic, eh?):).

ZENN Motor Company was started by Ian Clifford – a professional photographer (BFA NSCAD ‘84)! – who had a desire to clean up the air and make the world a better place while sitting idling in a traffic jam one day, exhaust fumes all around him. Clifford began his research in 1995 and the company went through two previous incarnations as Feel Good Cars and Dauphine Electrics. Clifford teamed up with EEStor, a Texas-based maker of energy storage systems (whose main investors also invested in Google, Palm and Amazon when they were starting up). This was 2001. By 2006, Feel Good Cars was listed on the TSX.V. In June 2006, Feel Good Cars became the ZENN Motor Company.

Can’t Drive on the Highway, Just in The City

So far the ZENN can’t go fast enough and is not licensed for highway driving. But if you live in Manhattan or any other major urban area and rarely leave the city, it’s perfect. Cost is reasonable, around $17,000 plus taxes. I know that if I was in the market for buying a car I’d check them out. They’ve got a hatchback design and you can even order them with a sunroof for extra.

Great Stock to Watch

My regular readers know I’m mostly a dividends investor, but I just can’t help looking at positive potential growth opportunities such as this. The ZENN is currently trading around $5.55 (no dividends) CAD, but I think there’s a lot more room for growth. They’ve got distribution throughout the US market and are starting to implement in Quebec, Canada. One California town has adopted the ZENN for all of its municipal vehicles. And there are more stories like that on their site. The stock is on sale a bit from its 52-week high at $6.89, but still up quite considerably from its 52-week low at $2.60. Earnings per share are still in the red at -$0.27, but I’m guessing that can’t last for long in this environment. Besides, they only just went public two years ago. Two years ago we were in a radically different economic and energy climate. I’ll bet ZENN is doing quite well now with the Honda back-up and new influx of compact-buyers and spike in electric car interest everywhere.

Just thought I’d let you know – what do you think of the ZENN? Would you pass it over because of its looks or design? Or because it can’t do highways? One solution is that you could save your regular clunker for the highways until it totally clunks out, meanwhile only using the ZENN in the city. It’s the cities, after all, where smog and air pollution are often the worst. We need all the help we can get.

I’d love to hear what you think – if you’ve Stumbled over here and are new to the site, drop me a comment down below, and subscribe to my feed for more updates like this one (click on the orange box near the logo).

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Tagged as: cars, electric cars, energy, environment, ZENN