Following up on our research, we interviewed an EV Star expert. He is an expert because he knows the EV Star well, inside and out. He wishes to be anonymous. The EV Star is GreenPower’s (GP) flagship vehicle, making up 96% of GreenPower’s vehicle deliveries over the past year.

The following are what he told us about the EV Star:

• From a moral perspective, we thought the safety and reliability need to be discussed.
• This vehicle isn’t what people perceive as the quality and having the integrity that most EVs do.
• It feels not well put together. And as your going down the road, it feels unsafe. If you get in a typical vehicle, you feel safe. Like a Honda. Like a Tesla feels safe. Much has been written about you can buy one of the well made ones for $120K which is less than a GreenPower vehicle. Any user out there that has been in an EV Star would instantly feel the unstable nature of it and would question their safety. I think anybody would.
• The integrity of the vehicle overall shocked me the most. It rattles like crazy.
• It shouldn’t shake and rattle as bad as that thing does. It’s the kind of thing that concerns someone going down the road, you would want to have something that’s more stable.
• The passengers can feel that instability. Anyone riding in it can feel it.
• It’s obviously a cheaply put together vehicle. It just looks and feels cheaply made.
• It looks, feels, drives, like a cheaply made Chinese copy of a Sprinter van.
• There are passengers who had a seatbelt come off of the seatbelt anchor. The fact that GreenPower wouldn’t worry about torquing down those bolts for safety, or put a lock there, I find highly disappointing.
• It doesn’t charge well at most places. And that’s not really a problem with the bus, but more so the charging infrastructure that’s out there. It’s not setup to charge it well. Most of the charging problems that have come is from people who can’t drive it as it didn’t charge overnight like it was supposed to.
• It has a problem with the battery getting overcharged.
• It’s governed to go no more than 65 MPH. I heard one of the reasons is because it’s such a large and heavy vehicle, they don’t want it to go faster than that.
• When it goes downhill faster than 65 MPH, then the engine cuts out and you lose the power steering and control of the vehicle.
• The vehicle has a 150 mile range, and for a vehicle that size, that’s not much. Most EV buses and shuttles will be 200-300 miles.
• The seats look good but are uncomfortable.