I Agree, Sondors Electric Autocycle is Everything Elio Is Not

Last year, Storm Sondors, a Malibu-based entrepreneur, used an IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign to launch a very basic $499 electric bicycle. He’s since sold 15,000 of his Asian-made electric bikes.

Buoyed by that success, Mr. Sondors has announced the creation of the Sondors Electric Car Company, which he says will sell an electric-powered, aluminum-bodied, three-passenger, enclosed reverse trike with a variety of battery pack options that offer 50 to 200 miles of range.

The Sondors electric trike is supposed to have a starting price of $10,000 and will be called the Model Sondors, more likely a nod to Tesla than to Henry Ford.

The folks over at Gas2.org think the Model Sondors is everything the proposed Elio is not. I agree with that statement, though not in the same way as Gas2go’s Steve Hanley.

Hanley’s colleague at Gas2.org, former TTAC contributor Jo Borras, has been one of Elio’s most vocal critics. Hanley echoes Borras, saying, “Elio has promised much but delivered little in the seven years since it began.”

Considering Elio is nearing production of a fully engineered vehicle with a unique unibody and its own engine, and Sondors is crowdsourcing money to build the first prototype of a vehicle for which it has released almost no details, dinging Elio for broken promises seems unfair in this context.

For his part, Sondors says he wants to make an affordable and practical electric car. To achieve that end, he says his team is designing the vehicle from scratch, “forgoing the unnecessary complexities and focusing on building a technology that people will love. It’s not about complicated engineering, it’s about ingenious technology.”

No details on that ingenious technology have been forthcoming besides range figures, the fact that the vehicle’s body will be constructed of aluminum, and it will be “charged by plugging it into the same outlet you plug a smartphone into every day.” One presumes that Sondors means a wall outlet, not the 4.5V 0.5A micro USB thing you use for your phone.

Like Elio and Tesla, there will be no independent Sondors dealers. The trikes will be sold directly from whatever factory in China Sondors contracts to make them.

It’s interesting that Sondors touts his bicycle company as a distributor, not a manufacturer. His e-bikes are made in the Far East and then drop shipped from their contractor directly to customers. One presumes he would use the same manufacturing model for his trikes.

To get the enterprise off of the ground, Sondors has started another crowdfunding campaign, this time at StartEngine, to raise the $1 million in capital needed to build its first working prototype. That effort won’t be shown to the public until sometime in 2017. For a minimum investment of $120, supporters get a reservation and ten shares of common stock in the company. So far, supporters have pledged about $240,000.

When Elio Motors started selling stock — around the time it introduced its fifth prototype first to qualified investors and then a larger offering under the Reg A+ provisions — I told Paul Elio to expect some criticism. Preston Tucker’s legal problems were partly the result of offering stock in a company that had no product to sell. Some of the same folks who raised eyebrows over Elio’s financing haven’t made a peep of skepticism about Sondors.

After it gets its first prototype built, Sondors will have a preorder program to determine sales interest and capital needs, followed by a second round of financing, presumably to start production. Sondors hopes to have as many as 120,000 initial orders by the time the car goes into production. Elio Motors currently has about 60,000 paid reservations for its trike, with an introductory price of $7,300.

As I’ve said concerning Elio, I’m a Detroiter and the idea of someone starting up a car company is romantic to me. I’m just not sure Storm Sondors understands the difference between designing a bicycle and mass producing something that meets Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. I know making something powered by electrons rather than evil gasoline gives it a halo of wonderfulness, but that doesn’t make it any easier to engineer. Designing any product from the ground up takes time. Designing something as complicated as a car takes years. Multi-billion dollar automakers brag when they can do it in less than two years. Tesla has had delays in getting its vehicles to market, and it’s using real automotive engineers, hired in Detroit, Tokyo and Stuttgart, not contract bicycle makers in China.

Mr. Sondors thinks he can engineer and build a working prototype in a year for $1 million. By comparison, Elio has burned through about $93 million dollars since 2009, when it showed its first prototype. Since then, it’s had four more true prototypes made. The latest, P5, has Elio’s own IAV-developed engine. Elio Motors is currently building a run of about two dozen pre-production vehicles that will be used to fine tune things for production. Those vehicles have a fully engineered unibody made of stamped steel panels, as well as Elio’s engines and the Aisin transmissions that’ll be used in production.

Elio is still a long shot. It still needs to raise the better part of a quarter billion dollars to buy production tooling and start building vehicles in its factory in Louisiana. I won’t bet $120 on Sondors, but I would bet $120 on Elio making it to production before Sondors.

I suppose in our crowdsourcing era, it might be quaint to bring up a term from earlier in the digital age: we used to call stuff like the Model Sondors “vaporware.” No mention of where it will be made, what kind of battery cells or motors, whether it will have front- or rear-wheel drive, no 0-60 mph times — or even if it’ll be able to go 60 miles an hour. Jo Borras is speculating that at the low price quoted by Sondors, the car will have to be some kind of low-speed neighborhood electric vehicle.

Even so, people have been less skeptical of the Sondors EV than of the Faraday Future venture. When it was first announced, the Faraday Future EV enterprise was mocked as not serious, but FF has serious financial support from Chinese backers and it’s hired, according to some reports, as many as a thousand engineers. Sondors has sold some e-bikes, put up a crowdfunding page, and has a weird video featuring Storm telling us about his dislike for furniture.

Elio may not have made a production car, but all that the Sondors Electric Car Company has produced so far are some nice computer renderings of a very slick looking three-wheeled coupe. Comparing pretty CGI renderings to a fully engineered and almost completely developed motor vehicle, I think it is fair to say, for the time being, the Model Sondors is indeed everything the Elio is not: vaporware.

For more information, you can check out the Sondors Electric Car Facebook page for developments. If you’d like to invest, its StartEngine page is here.

[Images: Sondors Electric Car Company]