FreZe Froggy and BeachStar: DARTZ's Electric Beach Roadsters

DARTZ builds three-tonne armoured BONDs. Its electric marque builds the opposite: a two-seater for the beach.

Small, open and electric

The FreZe Froggy starts as a FreZe Nikrob, the city car FreZe sells on the Wuling Hongguang Mini EV. FreZe replaces the 2+2 seats with a speedster-style rear deck and a spoiler, “as roadsters aren’t school buses”, and gives it a blockier body with four headlights. Autocar reported a 27 bhp motor and a top speed of 62 mph, about 100 km/h, when it was unveiled in August 2022.

Named after a Beetle

The name is older than FreZe. In 1993 DARTZ built the DARTZ VW Froggy, one of the most advanced Volkswagen Beetles of its time, with a television and a video player, a rarity then. It stands today as a monument in a dinosaur park. A year later came the Golden Calf beach buggy, named for the aluminium calf skull on its roll cage, which DARTZ calls the direct inspiration for the Froggy and BeachStar roadsters. The green paint of the Froggy nods to the original.

Read about DARTZ’s early years.

Cheap, made opulent

The Froggy’s brief was a DARTZ joke with a serious edge. As Autocar reported, the aim was to make the cheapest EV in the EU market “visually affordable for tycoons”. Three versions were announced at launch, Millennium, Millennium Adventure and Millennium Adventure Signature Edition, the last costing, in DARTZ’s words, as much as an expensive roadster. A targa version and a buggy, the FreZe Mojo EV, were to follow. The names nod to the Millennium Adventure of 1999, which DARTZ says it took part in.

A separate marque

FreZe runs as its own marque within the DARTZ group, and its founder keeps the two apart: Leonard F. Yankelovich has called it a mass-market brand. The name itself comes from Frese & Co., which built Russia’s first electric car in 1902 and joined the Russo-Baltic works in 1910. Read the Frese story.