A Deer’s Greenest Nightmare

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Finally, an electric vehicle even Sarah Palin could love.

Most electric vehicle manufacturers promote their products by touting benefits such as curbing global warming, advancing energy independence and cutting operating costs. But one Mississippi company is working a different angle: all the better to kill deer with.

According to Bad Boy Enterprises, the chief reason to buy its all-electric $9,995, 20 mph 35 miles-per-charge, four-wheel-drive off-road utility terrain vehicle, called the Bad Boy Buggy, is that it’s so quiet, deer won’t hear your approach. In fact, that’s the company’s slogan: ‘They’ll never hear you coming.’

This might seem a bit extreme, but we at Up to Speed find it a bit refreshing. After all, not all vehicles are used for trips from Venice Beach to the nearest Trader Joe’s to load up on organic vegan soysages and pomegranate wheat grass cocktails. Simply put, you can’t use a Prius to race over sand dunes, haul manure or stalk white tails through the brush.

And if the idea behind electrification is to break the carbon chain, then, heck, we don’t just need electric cars, we also need electric motorcycles, electric half-ton pickups and yes, electric big game killing machines.

To be fair, the Bad Boy Buggy isn’t made to actually kill animals. Its mission is to get you close enough to do it yourself. To that end, the 1,650-pound Buggy uses lead-acid batteries to turn two 13- horsepower motors with 130 foot-pounds of torque, giving it a max payload (including Bambi’s mom) of 1,000 pounds. While the entry-level machine is under $10,000, a stretch version sells for $11,500, and owners can pimp out their Buggies with everything from alloy wheels to bow-and-arrow racks.

Gasoline and diesel-powered competitors, such as the Kawasaki Mule and the Polaris Ranger run from about $6,200 up to $13,000 for fully loaded models, so the Bad Boy is priced pretty competitively.

Celebrity owners include country musicians Blake Shelton, Gary LeVox and Aaron Tippin, who in an on-site testimonial, says: ‘Bad Boy Buggies don’t make noise or leave scent, making them a hit with me.’

Ronel Bronson of New Braunfels, Texas -- a.k.a. the Buggy Princess -- is one of 170 Bad Boy dealers. She said hunters are the main purchasers of Bad Boy Buggies, but the vehicles also appeal to campers and other outdoor enthusiasts. ‘Think of it as a golf cart on steroids,’ she said, adding that although customers mainly choose it for its quiet operation, they also like the fact that it doesn’t use petroleum. ‘We’re taking a different sector off the fossil fuel supply as well.’

So far, about 11,000 have been sold since the company was founded in 2003. California doesn’t have a dealership, and execs from the Natchez, Miss., company were in Santa Monica last week to look for possible outlets, according to Selah Willard, Bad Boy’s executive vice president of sales and marketing.

Bronson, an avid hunter, sells an average of 120 Bad Boys a year, and now does sales work for the parent company. Her start came, appropriately enough, because she was tired of scaring deer while driving her John Deere Gator UTV.

‘This was designed to be quiet, stealthy and help you get up to prey without them hearing you,’ Bronson said.

--Ken Bensinger