Here's The Renault Twizy in the US, Hassle-free. No, Really.

Aaron Cole
by Aaron Cole

Nissan is sending 10 Renault Twizys Nissan New Mobility Concept vehicles to San Francisco as part its citywide ride sharing service Scoot.

The small, all-electric Renault Twizy Scoot Quad will seat two people, have a range of roughly 40 miles and a top speed of 25 mph. The cars will cost $8 per ride or $80 per day to rent.

According to Nissan, the cars are being sent to the ride-sharing service to study transportation in urban areas — and to see if they can sell them anywhere else, probably.

“As large cities continue to grow into megacities globally, we need to understand how transportation is changing and look ahead to anticipate what transportation needs will look like in the future,” Rachel Nguyen, executive director of the Nissan Future Lab, said in a statement.

According to the automaker, the first Nissan Leaf sold in the U.S. was delivered to San Francisco.

Getting the Twizy in America isn’t as onerous as, say, getting a gray-market Skyline R34 across the border — or Mercedes B Class — but it is fairly pain-in-the-ass-ish. Nissan has made the Twizy available for selected fleets, including Scoot, but the car is still fairly rare in America.

The Twizy can be purchased as a Neighborhood Electric Vehicle — not licensed for the roads — but the car’s batteries are leased through Renault, which means you’d need a European bank account to pay the lease every month.

Our neighbors to the north already announced they’d attempt to sell the Twizy with its original badging. A private distributor, Azra Network, also owns an EV charging network in the province of Quebec.

(Presumably the same two people won’t be driving the cars everywhere around town with the same looks on their faces.)


Aaron Cole
Aaron Cole

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  • Cprescott People do silly things to their cars.
  • Jeff This is a step in the right direction with the Murano gaining a 9 speed automatic. Nissan could go a little further and offer a compact pickup and offer hybrids. VoGhost--Nissan has  laid out a new plan to electrify 16 of the 30 vehicles it produces by 2026, with the rest using internal combustion instead. For those of us in North America, the company says it plans to release seven new vehicles in the US and Canada, although it’s not clear how many of those will be some type of EV.Nissan says the US is getting “e-POWER and plug-in hybrid models” — each of those uses a mix of electricity and fuel for power. At the moment, the only all-electric EVs Nissan is producing are the  Ariya SUV and the  perhaps endangered (or  maybe not) Leaf.In 2021, Nissan said it would  make 23 electrified vehicles by 2030, and that 15 of those would be fully electric, rather than some form of hybrid vehicle. It’s hard to say if any of this is a step forward from that plan, because yes, 16 is bigger than 15, but Nissan doesn’t explicitly say how many of those 16 are all-battery, or indeed if any of them are.  https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/25/24111963/nissan-ev-plan-2026-solid-state-batteries
  • Jkross22 Sure, but it depends on the price. All EVs cost too much and I'm talking about all costs. Depreciation, lack of public/available/reliable charging, concerns about repairability (H/K). Look at the battering the Mercedes and Ford EV's are taking on depreciation. As another site mentioned in the last few days, cars aren't supposed to depreciate by 40-50% in a year or 2.
  • Jkross22 Ford already has an affordable EV. 2 year old Mach-E's are extraordinarily affordable.
  • Lou_BC How does the lower case "armada" differ from the upper case "Armada"?
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