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Financing Elio Motors Development And Production
- Thread starter elio_curious
- Start date
Thanks, The evblue site is interesting. I was looking at kits from evwest obviously more expensive.
Was that an electric train?
When the E-series vehicles are ready for test drive events is not up to the marketing team. The timing on the ride and drive events will instead depend on when the engineering team reaches their objectives. These vehicles are being built for testing so they belong to the engineering team until they are released to the marketing team for refurbishment and reuse as test drive vehicles. My guess is marketing team will not be completely left out however they will likely only have a single E-series vehicle, and/or possibly an upgraded P4, during most of the testing time period. This will likely be used primarily for media test drives and other related marketing efforts.
Another item to keep in mind is that about half the pre-production vehicles will be destroyed in crash testing so even if they begin with 25 test vehicles there will only be a dozen or so left over and it is likely the engineering team will keep several of those for testing, especially software development, right up until the first vehicles roll off the line in Shreveport. This means that even if they begin with 25 test vehicles there will likely be fewer than 10 vehicles, and possibly only a handful, for the marketing team to eventually use on the early test drive events. Even 2-3 vehicles is likely enough for events limited only to early reservation holders however I believe many people are expecting a huge test drive fleet of 18-25 vehicles to show up during these early test drive events which is not going to happen unless there are some major changes to the plan as we know it.
The majority of reservation holders will likely have a chance at ride and drive events before they make their decisions however EM knows that it is very likely that reservations holders whose vehicles will be produced in the first 2-3 months stand a good chance of not having this opportunity. This is why EM has not promised this would happen but instead set a more general goal for these event happening around the time of first delivery. The reality is that to offer these ride and drive events to reservation holders before even the first reservation holder needs to make their choice this means that a good portion of the road testing would have to be wrapped up over three months prior to the beginning of production and that is cutting it tight as the road test vehicles will need to be refurbished prior to test drives and we have been told that our orders are supposed to be placed about two months prior to delivery. We can all hope this happens, as I know we would all enjoy the opportunity, however I try and dispel this misconception as much as possible so people are realistic and understand the reality that this very well may not happen for most of us who currently have EM production 'spot in line' numbers.
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in addition the projections for the production of 25 test vehicles were made a good while back .... I can't help but wonder if today's financial climate will have any impact on the number of them that are actually produced .... nice to have and got to have can easily be two different numbers
Very good point. I am sure funding levels will be a factor in how vehicle testing is conducted. If EM has more money for testing they can build and test more vehicles simultaneously which speeds up the testing timetable. However if EM does not have as much funding available they simply build fewer vehicles and the testing process takes longer to the cover the same amount of testing with fewer vehicles.
Paul tends to try and stick to numbers he's quoted, even if dates were highly elastic.
And too, once you've allocated to build 10, the extra 15 are not that much more money. But he will not build more than is needed.
So I suspect it will be exactly 25, unless not all of the tests/uses have been identified. Which isn't likely.
Now if the funding were suddenly approved, (and before the 3-4th quarter of this year), then 'wish lists' may get more attention and the number could well go up. JMHO.
Actually 25 is not an exact number as even EM has allowed for wiggle room on that number. A Tech Talk states 18-26 as the number but also if you listen carefully they usually state the number of as 'about' or 'around' 25 or two dozen when they speak about this.
Having vacillated back & forth I finally opted on the side of the 5 spd.
I figure if I don't like it &/or grow tired of the clutch pedal, or don't care
about autocrossing my Elio any more, etc., etc. I'll just trade it on the
new "TURBO" model w/auto when it comes out!!!
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This poses as a conundrum. Rather a chicken & egg problem.
That is where the private placement cash comes in to get Elio
to the "Confidence level" for the ATVM to be a slam dunk........
