Legion Troll
A fine upstanding poster
It’s still at least $200 million away.
It’s supposed to be in production by late 2016 — but it was also supposed to roll off the line by mid-year, by third-quarter 2015 and by July 2014.
“We’ll make it,” says Jerome Vassallo of Warren, vice president of sales for Elio Motors. A chirpy crowd-funded stock offering that ended Feb. 1, “put us over the hump.”
He says the Phoenix-based company now has enough money to build 25 duplicates of the fifth-generation prototype at the auto show, a fleet it can experiment with and wreck as needed for various tests.
Specifically, he says the company has $100 million of the $300 million it will take to crank out cars in a former Hummer factory near Shreveport, Louisiana.
In theory, the gap will be filled with a loan from a Department of Energy program called Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing.
There’s no promise the loan will be approved, though, and at least two similarly earnest companies went out of business while they were slogging through the process.
If Elio Motors folds, the stock buyers lose their money, and so do many of the 48,000 people who’ve put down deposits of $100 to $1,000 so they can own the first Elio on the block.
Paul Elio, an automotive engineer, founded Elio Motors in 2008.
It’s been an uneven ride since. For awhile, in fact, he was pounding nails into Arizona rooftops to pay his bills.
In 2010, he proposed taking over a former GM truck plant in Pontiac and claimed he could put 2,100 people to work.
When that didn’t happen, he settled on Shreveport, where 1,500 workers will supposedly average $47,700 a year plus benefits.
By federal standards, they’ll be building a motorcycle, since it has less than four wheels.
The Elio has tandem seating, with the passenger perched behind the driver in cramped, upright quarters.
Executive editor Joe Wiesenfelder of Cars.com is not optimistic.
Start-up car companies “find a learning curve much steeper than they expected,” he says.
Elon Musk, he notes, is a builder of spaceships and electric vehicles, and “between rocket science and Tesla, he says Tesla is harder.”
http://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/columnists/neal-rubin/2016/01/18/neal-rubin-elio-motors-detroit-auto-show-jalopnik/78988884/
