Michael and Kenny Ham

Your neighborhood is in flames, the roads destroyed and there at least a dozen hungry zombies gnawing their way through your back door. You need a getaway car, and Michael and Kenny Ham might have just the machine for you. The two brothers are in the midst of developing an electric four-wheeler for the post-apocalyptic era: not a luxury sedan capable of tackling lengthy distances, but a compact, affordable all-terrain vehicle rugged enough to survive the end of the world.

"We came up with the concept for the ApocalypsEV-1 around the time Harold Camping was predicting the rapture," Michael Ham says. "It got us thinking, if there's ever any kind of apocalypse, they're going to stop making gasoline." But, presuming the sky isn't entirely blacked out, there will still be enough sunlight to charge a battery. "This would be a situation in which our apocalypse car—which runs on a combination of electricity and solar power—is the best car on the planet," Michael explains.

The motivation behind the idea might sound wild, but Michael, 30, a physicist in computer vision research at New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Kenny, 24, a mechanical engineering student at Kansas State University, are serious innovators (with a bit of a thing for Armageddon). In 1999 Michael helped to build a liquid-nitrogen-powered car that premiered at the Toronto auto show. A decade later the brothers created TWEAK—Three-Wheeled Electric Alternative by KinAestheticWind. (KinAestheticWind is their nonprofit organization.)

Though currently in its pre-prototype stage, the ApolcalypsEV-1 has impressive design specs. The two-seat car would be street legal, with turn signals, seatbelts and headlights. The 1100-pound vehicle would be made of off-the-shelf components easy to obtain online—making it simple to repair—and feature a built-in 110-volt AC charging system so drivers can charge the six Exide Orbital batteries (which together provide about 225 amp-hours) from any standard outlet. "A smaller vehicle gets to use a smaller battery pack," Kenny Ham says, "making it faster to recharge." The design also includes four hub-mounted 10-hp brushless motors that offer off-road performance similar to that of an ATV. "[That] comes in handy when you've attempting to navigate the unmaintained (or nonexistent) roadways of the post-apocalypse," Kenny says. The dune buggy–style frame comes with saddlebag-mounted battery packs, which provide a low center of gravity for faster turning and handling, and 40 watts of solar panels to charge the batteries even after the last remaining gas stations have dried up and the electric power grid is long gone. And, when it comes to zombie survival, safety also matters. The ApolcalypsEV-1 will have an off-road-ready roll cage and five-point harness seatbelts, so drivers can tackle even the roughest potholes and stay intact.

All those features make the EV-1 end-of-the-world-ready, but the apocalypse is just a selling point. "Our primary goal with the ApocalypsEV-1 is to provide the cost savings of an electric car for the price of an ATV," Kenny says. And while the ApocalypsEV-1 isn't quite what most people would want as a commuter car (besides looking like a dune buggy, it would be limited to a maximum of 25 mph on 35-mph roads), the lightweight design demonstrates how to bring down the cost of an EV. "By scaling down electric vehicles to ATV/dune-buggy size and slowing them down to around 40 mpg, thus reducing our power requirements from the 70-to-200-hp range to the cheaper 10-to-40-hp range, we [should be able] to design an electric vehicle that only costs $5000 to $8000," Kenny says. "And since we don't plan to be outrunning zombies every week," he adds, "the primary purpose of the solar panels is to act as a boost charger both when the vehicle is running and sitting idle, thus making it much less likely that someone will run out of power while driving around."

While the Hams are the driving force behind ApocalypsEV-1, their post-cataclysm cars are really crowd creations. To cover the cost of the prototype, for instance, the brothers haveturned to global funding platform IndieGoGo, one of the new breed of sites such as KickStarter that allow innovators to ask the Web for micro-donations. The Hams are also considering teaching an extended learning course on building electric and solar-powered vehicles—something they did with TWEAK—that will allow students to help with some of ApocalypsEV-1's manual labor. Constructing the car of the future, the Hams say—however catastrophic that future may be—is a definite draw.

But if the end of the world doesn't come, the Hams' projects might show the world that electric vehicles could be off-road beaters and not just dainty second cars for urbanites. "We want to make this thing rugged enough there's basically zero maintenance," Michael says. "We want this to be the old Toyota pickup trucks that are still in use everywhere and just don't die."

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