BOISE, Idaho — Boise based go kart track Fast Lane spent more than a million dollars transitioning to a new home with electric karts that it says will set them up for a bright future.
- Fast Lane Indoor Karting have switched from gas powered karts to faster electric karts.
- Fast Lane spent over $1 million transitioning to a new location and electric cars.
- You can get $10 races from 10 a.m. to noon each day at Fast Lane until New Year's.
- Most car manufacturers vow to go fully electric in the next 10 years.
(Below is the transcript from the broadcast story)
When you're on the track, torque and speed are essential, and that's what you get with electric cars.
That's just one of the reasons why Fast Lane Indoor Kart Racing went all electric a few months ago.
"The old gas cars besides being stinky and dealing with oil changes and then you gotta dispose of the oil. The new ones are just basically a battery and a motor," said the owner of Fast Lane, Bradley Gorringe.
Such reasoning is also why electric car sales in the US are on the rise. For instance, California, a state that's larger than most countries in the world, increased its sales of new electric cars from 2% to 22% in the last five years.
And according to Fortune magazine, some $200 billion is being spent on 100 US factories for EV's and the batteries that power them.
"The amount of maintenance has been pretty minimal. We used to have three or four cars in the back at any given time needing repair and here, the only maintenance really is if people are running into each other," said Gorringe.
Back at the track, charging takes about ten minutes per car, and low maintenance will help pay off the cars in hopefully about three years.
One of the biggest problems with EV's is finding a charging station outside of your home, but they're already turning up in innovative places. A local Sonic has taken out an entire row of stalls to make way for Tesla charging stations so you can eat and refuel at the same time.
"Why do you love it?" I asked young racer Jessie Graham.
"The amount of speed you get around the corners feels really nice and the control between cars really get on you. It feels like riding on a cloud," he replied.
And when these kids grow up to get their own car, they'll have a lot of electrics to choose from because most companies are vowing to go fully electric in the next ten years.
