Storm Sondors doesn’t like driving.
And yet he’s behind an ambitious project to build a $10,000 electric car through a company bearing his name. During Sondors Electric Car Company’s inaugural press conference at the Los Angeles auto show—just outside the exhibition hall in a space that had formerly been occupied by troubled Elio Motors—the CEO expressed his sentiments about driving and didn’t mince words about how he feels about the automotive industry as a whole. “I hate industries; I hate tradition,” he declared, at an event that’s very much an industry tradition.
If you don’t think his approach will get the company very far, well, it has worked in the past. Sondors is a crowdfunding success story; he launched a successful electric-bicycle company after, he claims, raising $12 million via Kickstarter and Indiegogo. It is now one of the largest e-bike makers in the United States, stating it has sold more than 30,000 of its electrified fat-tire bikes here and in 40 other countries.
As with his e-bikes, in a plan typical of automotive startups, he’s hoping to deliver cars directly to customers without traditional dealerships. Sondors also said the company is looking for customers who have a DIY mindset: The car is being engineered so that owners will be able to do the vast majority of fixes themselves using a simple kit of seven tools—a useful skill given the lack of dealership service. (The company will be able to do remote diagnostics for powertrain issues.)
Sondors’s car is perhaps the best-looking of the current batch of three-wheeled vehicles that take advantage of a federal loophole classifying them effectively (in most states) as motorcycles. That includes the Polaris Slingshot, the Elio E1, the Electra Meccanica Solo, the Arcimoto FUV, and even the Toyota i-Road. “Electric has to look cool. It can’t go cheap, it can’t look cheesy, it can’t look goofy,” Sondors said.
From Happy Meals to (Fast) Trikes
Sondors said his design background is part of what compelled him to make the car. His success with the e-bike and a desire to make electric transportation available to the masses were other considerations. Prior to e-bikes, the Latvia-born Sondors designed radio-controlled vehicles and at one point designed McDonald’s Happy Meal toys. “A lot of people don’t know that McDonald’s is the largest toy company in the world,” he pointed out.
The toy work taught him how to take something very complex and break it down into something simpler and separate out the gimmicks, Sondors said. “When I look around here [gesturing out to the show floor], it’s all gimmicks.”
Sondors said he has tried hard to omit the gimmicks and to use off-the-shelf components wherever possible. The car will use 3500-milliamp-hour (mAh) Panasonic cells in the 18650 format—just as in the Tesla Model S and Model X—with versions differing in capacity for a 75-, 150-, or 200-mile driving range. He said design work was done through Italy’s Torino Design, and U.K. company Protean Electric provided the PD18 in-wheel motor (because he’s familiar with them via e-bikes). About 150 people have worked on specific tasks for the car, but the company has just 10 employees in Santa Monica, Sondors told us.
The company plans to take the same approach with production and is looking at a company in Italy for the initial round of production but may end up keeping it local in California for the first 1000 to 2000 units, according to Sondors.
Fun, Even If You Don’t Like Driving?
Sondors sounded passionate about his car, despite his professed aversion to driving. Which may be why Sondors seemed downright apologetic about one point: “It still has a steering wheel; hopefully sooner or later we can lose that, because I hate driving,” he said. “The faster we get to autonomous the better.”
He has an offbeat plan for that, too. With so many suppliers and automakers doing the same development simultaneously, he predicted that the costs of plug-and-play sensors, actuators, and components are going to come down fast, especially for a trike that may only need to use some of the passenger-car system.
The current driving prototype cost about $1 million to build, Sondors said. The next step for the company, after its current $2 million fundraising to build a production-bound prototype, will be a $20 million push for tooling and production.
The more time you spend around Sondors, the more he impresses as the polar opposite of Paul Elio, who has taken his company on a very different route to create an affordable, efficient three-wheeled quasi-car. Sonders sees his outsider status as a badge of authenticity, while Elio wants to be taken seriously by the automotive establishment. However, even with the relatively easier regulatory path that Sondors faces with a three-wheeled vehicle, the founder’s belief that he can merely upsize some of the decisions made for his $500 e-bikes can sound more than a little naive.
While Elio’s gasoline-powered project started back in 2009, Sondors plans to deliver his electric trike in just three years. It’s possible he’ll make it happen—if he stays interested, and if you care to pitch in for the cause.
from Car and Driver BlogCar and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/2EECfY3
via IFTTT
0 comments:
Post a Comment