The Shreveport facility was presented by RACER Trust for three years, but there were no takers until Elio Motors showed an interest. According to Elio, Phoenix did not show any interest until about six months after the deal was presented by Elio. However, it is a very generous arrangement since Elio doesn’t need to pay any rent for this acquired space until the cars start coming out of the assembly line.
Elio also talked about the difficulties he faced while raising the capital. According to him, Hegde funds, venture capital and private equity had no interest in giving 3-4 million dollars to a startup which won’t make any revenue for the next two years.
Elio said to the parish representatives that they are more interested in giving 2 million dollars to get the next Facebook. Thankfully, the bankers became interested once the company went public and acquired 61,000 reservations for cars.
Elio said that 12 months back nobody bothered returning his calls and now he has meetings with them. He mentioned that they need 300 million dollars to start making cars and till now, all they have is 120 million dollars.
Stay tuned for more updates on Elio Motors!
If Elio builds it, I’d like to build an integrated kit for the rear wheel including electric motor and small battery for hybrid operation, with an integrated wheel and hub motor and a Raspberry Pi as the system microcontroller.
Figure maybe $5,000 for the kit with machined parts included, parts list, plans, and code at no charge if you want to DIY.
Elio’s right to design it for an ICE before moving forward with plug-in hybrid or EV variants. In the end, with a front wheel drive automobile, designing this way leads to a large equipment bay with drive access to the front wheels and power cable access to the rear wheel. There’s no reason to consider concessions to EV or PIH at this juncture because there’s no reason the Elio would make that transition even remotely difficult.