The Elio Motors hybrid
car/motorcycle is coming
to the shuttered former General Motors plant in southwest Shreveport. The three-wheeled
vehicle is like an enclosed motorcycle, two seats one right behind the other
with basic operating conveniences. It looks odd, but its founder and its
private sector venture capitalist, the latter actually providing the majority
of resources to purchase the old facility and also opening up the building to
other tenants, hope it will succeed on gas mileage figures at least a third
higher than any other current automobile and a price half of any of them.
The state’s
contribution comes from incentive and tax abatement programs that may or
may not actually return more money to the state than is forgone, but at least
won’t be triggered until there is actual production and targets to be reached.
Caddo Parish’s is in the form of backing $1 million of $10 million worth of
industrial development bonds, with the potential to lose it all if the
enterprise goes belly-up and saddled with owning an idle property.
Departures from the typical four-wheeled, mainly gasoline-powered internal
combustion engine for automobiles have not fared well. Louisiana lived through
the whole V-Vehicle/Next Autoworks fiasco in the past four years that resulted
in the state having to claw back money it gave up front, and now Delaware
stands to lose tens of millions on the failing Fisker electric vehicle venture
that it has sunk in and/or won’t be able to claw back. Unanswered questions
abound about the real marketability of the Elio concept car.
Will dudes really go for just a two-seater, one behind the other, that
does not have a motorcycle’s attraction of the wind whipping through your hair under
your “brains bucket” as you whip through the streets/country with a hot chick holding
onto your waist (big bikes are very stable, but you never tell that to hot
chicks to whom you wish to give a ride)? For the younger of both sexes, whom
one would think would be the most price-conscious, are you really going to pull
up outside of your date’s pad in this? Are people really going to plunk a fair
amount of money down on something without a trunk and can’t hold much more cargo
than a few bags of groceries? Are they really going to feel secure cruising
down city streets, much less highways, with most other vehicles two to three times
bigger trundling along – computer simulations promise a five-star federal
government safety rating, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be
disproportionately more accidents with and much higher overall damage to such
small vehicles? Because of this, will insurance costs eat away in large part at
the pricing and operating cost advantages?
At least parallel parking would appear easy. But it might be wishful
thinking, given consumer preferences, that the price angle might override other
considerations such as this. Two-wheel, even three-wheel, motorcycles are
chosen for reasons much different that a four-wheel automobile. This gap the
hybrid faces might be a bridge too far to be commercially successful.
1 comment:
Let 'em try it, go for it; just use their own money, not taxpayers'. Looks like a toy to me.
Now, if it were along the lines of a classic Morgan 3-wheeler, it might have a go, but it would never sell enough to be of significant economic benefit to Louisiana.
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