Yikes! Ouch! My wallet is crying over the seemingly relentless price escalation of gasoline, natural gas, heating oil, and the like, and everything tied to these resources: food, transportation, clothes, electricity, need I continue?

Now add in serious pollution, traffic congestion and global warming, which we hear about every day. The “Green” movement is in full swing now. For example, the mayors of the San Francisco Bay Area have formed the Bay Area Climate Compact, with objectives that include increasing the use of electric vehicles.

This brings us to ZuumCraft. We see a great need for an affordable clean-tech sustainable solution to the single-rider short trip transportation problem. On Sept. 19, 2008, ZuumCraft launched ZuumQuest ’08 (www.ZuumCraft.com/quest/) to promote “clean tech” vehicles and the environmental benefits of “green” personal transportation.

ZuumQuest ‘08 travels more than 600 miles through beach communities in California building excitement about environmentally sensitive personal transportation. TeamZuumer™ meets with local personalities and notable companies who promote sustainable transportation, such as Electric Auto Association, Google, Stanford University, engineering groups at Cal Poly, the Mayor of Santa Barbara, and others.

Knowing that over half of 957 million cars trips/day in the US are 5 miles or less with only one person, we want to explore questions such as: What do people do on these short trips? What are people’s perceived challenges to adopting short-distance green transportation? How do they see the usability of personal electric vehicles? How practical is it? Can personal electric vehicles be practical and yet cool and fun?

Keep your eye on the www.ZuumCraft.com/quest/ site for more details and to meet up with us at your favorite California beach to test ride this amazing vehicle.