Three pinstriped London investors stand outside an electric car factory in the green fields of the Norwegian countryside, waiting their turns to test-drive a stylish two-seater called the Think City.
But first, Think CEO Jan-Olaf Willums takes the wheel. While the moneymen fiddle with their BlackBerrys, Willums, looking slightly rumpled like the academic he once was, turns the ignition, and the stub-nosed coupe silently rolls toward an open stretch of pavement. Suddenly he punches the pedal, and the car takes off like a shot, the AC motor instantaneously transferring power to the wheels. The only sound is the squealing of tires as Willums throws the little car into a tight turn and barrels back toward his startled guests.
“That looks fun,” Frode Aschim of Range Capital Partners says with a grin. Minutes later, he slides into the driver’s seat and speeds away…
Did someone kill the electric car? You wouldn’t know it on this bright May morning in Scandinavia, where the idea of a mass-produced battery-powered vehicle is being resurrected and actual cars are scheduled to begin rolling off the production line by year’s end…
Willums’s pitch is this: He’s not just selling an electric car; he’s upending a century-old automotive paradigm, aiming to change the way cars are made, sold, owned, and driven.
Very interesting article, wandering through several avenues of alternatives in transportation and manufacturing. TH!NK is an electric car project Ford sold off because their “analysts” concluded there would never be a market for such a critter. Worth the read, folks.
By the bye – the Th!nk City car should be manufactured in a California-based factory and sold in the U.S., next year.
There are a few major obstacles to wide spread mass transit in LA
1. Building underground is prohibitively expensive in most cases because of earthquakes.
2. You cannot replace existing roads with mass transit lines because it creates traffic havoc. Thus, you generally have to build it next to or along side existing roads. In almost all cases, the land is incredibly expensive even using eminent domain.
3. You have to build *a lot* of transit lines in order to hit a tipping point where it is useful. For example, dropping someone off in Pasadena might put them 10 miles from their destination.
Then there are other issues like having enough runs that are sufficiently timely so that commuters do not have to wait more than 15 minutes for the next ride. I live in LA and I’d love to be able to take rail to work but it is simply not going to happen in my lifetime.