Ohms and aahs as B.C.-made electric car makes its debut
You’d think a $2-million race-red Ferrari LaFerrari had just descended on Vancouver’s Olympic Village plaza.
Excited onlookers gathered quickly Thursday to take selfies standing next to the unique vehicle and to sit in the driver’s seat to embrace the cockpit-like ambience.
“Isn’t it adorable?” said one fancier.
“Where do you put the groceries?” asked another.
But the object of their affection wasn’t a hyper-expensive European luxury car.
It was the Sparrow, a $20,000, made-in-B.C., single-user electric vehicle with two front wheels, one rear wheel and a sort of covered-motorcycle appearance.
The Sparrow is just 2.7 metres long, 1.2 metres wide and weighs 578 kilograms. It has room for one person and comes with a small trunk that can carry about four bags of groceries.
There’s just one prototype vehicle on display now, but Electra-Meccanica Vehicles Corp. founder Jerry Kroll said 14 more will be built at the company’s New Westminster plant this year, 120 next year and as many as 1,200 in 2017, when he plans to operate a new 200,000-square-foot assemblyline plant somewhere in Metro Vancouver.
“Eighty-three per cent of people drive by themselves in a fourperson car, which is ridiculous,” he said. “Why do you think traffic and parking sucks? This will be perfect for the mission of commuting back and forth to work.”
Kroll said the vehicle is approved for highway use and has a maximum speed of 130 km/h. He said it can travel up to 140 kilometres on a single charge and it takes about four hours to fully charge the lithium ion battery when it is fully depleted.
Kroll, a 54-year-old Vancouver entrepreneur who races Formula Enterprise cars, has joined forces with Intermeccanica owner Henry Reisner to produce and market the Sparrow in a crowded electric-vehicle market.
Intermeccanica makes about 18 classic roadsters a year at its New Westminster facility.
Kroll and Reisner are raising about $2.25 million in private funding that will get Electra-Meccanica to the point where it will start building cars in a new facility.
The pair then hope to raise $40 million to $50 million through an initial public offering that could happen sometime in 2017.
Kroll said Abbotsford has shown a lot of interest in locating the car manufacturing plant within a 400-hectare high-tech industrial park in the city.
He said the Sparrow will sell for $19,888 and expects it will soon qualify for the B.C. government’s $5,000 Clean Energy Vehicle grant, which would bring the buyer’s cost down to $14,888.
Huge car manufacturers such as Tesla and BMW have invested heavily in the electric-car market and even Apple and Google are testing the waters of fossil-fuelfree vehicles.
So how can a small B.C. company compete with those giants? Kroll said it’s all about finding a niche, claiming that if Electra-Meccanica can sell vehicles to just one-tenth of one per cent of the Canadian target market, that would work out to 14,000 car sales a year.
“That leaves 99.9 per cent of the market for anybody else,” he said.
Canadian auto industry analyst Dennis DesRosiers said the entire B.C. market buys just 300 electric vehicles a year, excluding hybrids.
“They’ll be going up against the giants of the world, so good luck to them,” he said. “Tesla hasn’t figured out how to be successful in British Columbia yet.”
DesRosiers said there’s still an “unquenching demand” in the market for more horsepower and when electric vehicles deliver that horsepower, it usually cuts down on the range that can be travelled on a single charge.
“I admire companies that are forging this territory but in my opinion, we’re probably a trillion dollars of research and development away from the (electriccar) technology being able to match the technology you get in an internal combustion engine,” he said.