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Last time I talked with Tom Liberatore he was coaxing a burnt out husk of an old Miata back to life, hoping to reincarnate it into a small-scale replica of a ’39 Alfa Romeo  Tipo 158 Gran Prix race car.

Between fabricating much of it from thin air and buying available parts, he figured it would take a year.  Thus I was more than surprised when he recently rolled (silently) up to my curb in a new vehicle, wife Liz perched in the back seat.

His new car-type product looked pretty much like a tarted up golf cart or maybe a riding lawn mower but like I said, with a back seat.  A single, narrow black bucket seat.

What Tom had decided was that rather than spend all of his summer, and much of his money resuscitating a dead Miata, he’d instead buy a small electric rig.  I immediately understood the wisdom behind buying this thing called an “Arcimoto” because it seemed the perfect cheap vehicle to haul him about in slow, safe style.

But the first thing an Arcimoto is not is cheap, and the second is slow.  As I was soon to learn.

Earlier I compared this thing to a gaudy golf cart, but that’s probably not fair.  A golf cart doesn’t have any doors, but an Arcimoto, with its back seat, doesn’t have twice as many doors, and when you snap on your seatbelt you soon realize one seatbelt is only half of them, and a single trip around the block made me think I needed six times as many.

Enough with the math, but this big little go-kart absolutely flies.  The Arcimoto is a tubular framed gizmo on three wheels with a plexiglass ceiling and not much else.  And  yeah, it’s definitely quieter than a lawn mower.

Also faster. Tom said he’d been rolling down 101 a day or two earlier and a friend on a BMW motorcycle pulled up alongside;  they agreed to race.  Both were doing 65, but not for long.  Tom last saw the motorcycle in his rear view mirror.

Let’s recap by climbing into the rear of a new Arcimoto.   You get one seat, two seat belts, no doors, no windows, no armrests or dome lights.  There are no cup holders, no ashtrays and no sound system.  It’s easy to count all the front and side airbags you don’t have, and how this baby got past the inspectors at the National Highway Transportation Safety Board is a funny little mystery, a little less funny at 60 miles per hour.

And an Arcimoto, my friends, gets to 60 faster than my ’15 Buick with a turbo engine.  Tom says it’s got a pair of electric motors that team up to deliver 77 horsepower, which doesn’t sound extravagant until you calculate that an Arcimoto probably weighs less than your dining room table.

Hurtling along North Dora at a measly 40 miles an hour is like being on some primitive but mildly thrilling amusement park ride.  Look down!

Without doors or windows the pavement is just past your ankle (choose either) and it’s all zippy, breezy and close-up.  With the electro-drive it just whirrs along, erasing other peoples’ carbon footprints as it goes.

Tom Liberatore loves his new road skimmer.  He’s a lifelong “car guy” who through the years has probably fixed, restored, repaired and owned more cars than I’ve owned socks.  He’s the former head of Mendocino County’s garage out on Low Gap Road, and used to run Diamond T Auto Service here in town.

Today he keeps busy in his Talmage garage via an endless stream of projects, all of which have engines.  Tom knows more about internal combustion engines than most people know about everything else in the world put together.  And Tom being Tom, he is naturally the only person in town owning an Arcimento, though rumors drifting down from MacNab Ranch hint at a woman named Jennifer Prevost having another.  Further inquiry to be undertaken.

And when he’s not fixing cars he’s riding motorcycles, sometimes competitively.  Tom broke seven all-time racing records at the Bonneville Salt Flats between 2004-14, and if you look up records from  2009 you’ll find Tom Liberatore still holds the fastest ever (156.3 mph) time in a modified pushrod gas & fuel category.  There are others.

What makes his feats even more remarkable is that he managed them while battling through early stages of Multiple Sclerosis.  (He didn’t win Bonneville glories alone, as he’s quick to tell anyone, because he had excellent help from more friends than this modest story can accommodate.)

Given what he’s been through and what he’s accomplished, Tom Liberatore oughta be the poster boy for MS.  The disease advances slowly except when it moves quickly, and the Ukiah summer heat has a draining, wilting effect on our favorite  gearhead.

There are times Tom is slowed to the point he only gets as much accomplished in a day as you do in a week or I do in a month.  Those times fade and he’s quickly back in the saddle.

Always a new project, always another challenge, often another road trip with his extended family of car / bike buddies to places I’ve sometimes heard of, others I couldn’t find on a map with google along for the ride.

If you see a black-and-yellow hornet-like blur glide past you in the near future give Tom a wave.  Maybe he’ll turn around, come back and take you for a ride.

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