WHITEROCK­ Anew kind of electric car is available for purchase in Northern New Mexico, and it gets more than 200 miles per gallon.
  In fact, Richard “Skipp” Dunn of Los Alamos has already taken calls from interested buyers in Oklahoma and other places around the country, since there are just 17 dealers nationwide that sell the car.
  The ZENN car ­ zero emis­sion, no noise ­ is made in Canada and offers a new option to drivers in New Mexico.
  The two-seat car is powered entirely by batteries that can be recharged from a household wall socket. It can travel about 35 miles before it runs out of juice, and the top speed is 35 mph.
  That’s not practical for long­haul commuters or delivery businesses, but it’s more than enough for most people to fin­ish daily errands or short com­mutes towork. In fact, about 70 percent of all commuters travel within the range of the car, Dunn said.
  It’s safer than other elec­tric cars on the market, also, because it has a unified alumi­num frame and a stronger sus­pension than other electric cars, which resemble golf carts.
  “It’s a real car,” said Dunn, who has the first dealership in New Mexico.
  His inventory consists of three cars in his garage that cost from $12,500 to $15,800.
  The company that makes the car hopes to produce and sell about 2,000 cars over the next year, said Ian Clifford, president of Feel Good Cars, Inc.
  “We hope to have another 20 or 30 dealers in the next quarter,” Clifford said in a phone interview from Toronto, where the company is based.
  The first 60 cars were shipped to dealers in November. The company takes the chassis, which is built by a French com­pany, and adds a drive system in its Montreal facility.
  The drive system isn’t that big of a deal. Instead of an engine under the tiny blue hood of Dunn’s personal car, there’s two big batteries. The rest are in the back of the car.
  “Where the gas tank used to be, four of the six batteries are here,” Dunn said in a recent interview.
  Dunn’s royal blue ZENN is about two-thirds the size of a Nissan Sentra, as the two cars were parked side by side in front of his White Rock home.
  “This car only weighs 1,200 pounds with all the batteries,” he said.
  The sticker on the side of the ZENN said it gets 245 miles per gallon, which is based on estimates of what it takes to produce electricity.
  “Beat that anywhere,” he said.
  He invited a visitor to take a spin. The cabin was a little tight with two people over 6 feet tall but worked well enough.
  There’s just two seats in the front. And the cargo area is big enough to hold a month’s worth of groceries, for example, or most of the gear for a youth soc­cer team.
  The car moves quickly, and quietly. There’s no sweltering engine, heat or fumes. Dunn says it’s a great way tomove around an urban neighborhood, and he noted that most streets in Albuquerque are within the speed limit of the car.
  These low-speed vehicles are perfectly street legal, and they are classified differently than a regular passenger car.
  In 1998, low-speed vehicle standards were adopted by the federal government, Dunn said. These included a seat belt, windshield and other require­ments. This enables the cars to be registered. Just don’t take it on the interstate.
  “The safety standards are less stringent because it operates in lower speed environments,” Clifford said. “The reality is that catastrophic accidents happen at high speeds, typically not at low speeds.”
  Clifford, the company presi­dent, said future plans include making high-speed vehicles.
  “To put enough batteries in to travel at highway speeds, to travel a useful distance ­ it’s just not practical right now,” Clifford said. “So what’s required is a significant battery breakthrough technology.”