Do you have a preorder deposit put down on an electric vehicle that has yet to arrive? Has your desire to buy said vehicle waned considerably? Are you tired of waiting? If so, Electra Meccanica has an offer for you. The Vancouver, B.C.–based electric carmaker has announced it will honor all deposits up to $1000 that people have made on preorders of new cars or trucks—from any manufacturer—and apply that amount toward a Solo electric car.
The Solo is a one-person commuter pod that gets an alleged 100 miles of range on a single charge of its 16-kW battery. The three-wheel Solo also has a top speed of 80 mph, the company says. However, it should be noted the Solo has not yet been approved by the Department of Transportation for use on U.S. roads. Company spokesman Jeff Holland said Electra Meccanica is going through final certification now and expects to be granted street-legal status soon.
Although the company will honor deposits on any make or model vehicle that is on preorder, Holland said the company sees manufacturers such as Elio Motors, Tesla, and General Motors as particularly vulnerable, with their Elio, Model 3, and Chevrolet Bolt EV, respectively.
Of course, the Solo is not quite in the same league as Tesla’s Model 3 or Chevrolet’s Bolt, which are full-fledged passenger cars.
Model 3 customers do have a bit of a wait ahead of them yet—Tesla’s $35,000 electric car is not expected to arrive until late 2017 at the earliest. But GM’s similarly priced Bolt is arriving in its first customers’ driveways this week.
The Solo is more similar to the three-wheeled Elio, a two-person-tandem electric car by the company of the same name. With a range of 84 miles, Elio Motors’ bare-bones EV has a starting price of just $7300. Electra Meccanica’s Solo is twice as expensive as the Elio, with a starting price of about U.S. $15,140.
But for potential buyers, the difference, Electra Meccanica hopes, could come down to availability.
“With the recent financial and production challenges faced by some of our competitors, we’ve had some of their reservation holders ask us if they could transfer their deposits over to a Solo because of either uncertainty about their vehicle ever being produced or they just didn’t want to wait for years to get their car,” Electra Meccanica CEO Jerry Kroll said in a release. “We wanted let others know that we will accept those deposits and provide relief for reservation holders with a suitable vehicle replacement option.” The suitability of the Solo as a replacement being pretty much directly proportional to the impatience of the deposit-paying customer.
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