I'm not being negative, just realistic. This reminds me of a talk I went to at a conference called, “Ethics and Prototyping”. In a nutshell, years ago, it was to prove the concept, meet the specifications and then work on attractive packaging. That's what legit companies still do today. With all of the advances of 3D modeling with surfacing and complex curvature, we now make an attractive package, write up a spec sheet and then go to work on making those specs a reality. Elio, Solo, SRK and Sondors all fit the bill for that. They gain public interest in the form of reservations or investment with a product that looks production ready and then it's advertised heavily through social media. For many that are not in new product R&D and manufacturing, the product shown is 90% complete. Reality is, it's not even 50% complete.
This is where the hard work begins. Thinking that building a one off prototype equates to close enough to production ready, was doable 50 years ago. As of today, not the case. SRK and Solo seemed to get the cool looking prototypes out there but they all got a dose of reality when it came to getting them out in the hands of the public. We might celebrate that Solo and SRK both got their cars into production but that's not what the real world calls production. When SRK and Solo have full time assembly lines running and they hit their numbers, that's production. Think about it, Tesla is getting dragged over the coals because they are not hitting production targets. In reality, they are mustering their way right now to get the product out the door.
I know Sondors did an e-Bike but again, that was easy because he went to the land where they make 99.9% of every bike on the planet for the last 30 years. Plus, if you have ever gone to China over the last 5 years, that Sondors bike was already out on the road, it just looked different because the Chinese use a bike for transportation and the government is going all electric anyway. I have an app that I can use a bike for free in China and there are even electric ones to use also. Many days, it's easier to just go get a bike, use the app to unlock it and ride 5-10 miles on an e-bike as opposed to other methods. Plus, Sondors is drop shipping the thing from China, thus it's not like he needs anything more than a computer today to process all of that. Engineering a bike is super easy as for what they are selling was done years ago. Here's the difference, a complete car is much different as opposed to a car. An electric car is China is much different than anything we'd buy here in America (except for the 1-20 people that like quirky things).