Berry Bernstein, a steel wholesaler and entrepreneur out of Philadelphia is planning his new ev business for the 21st century. Bernstein is following the template made popular by many other ev start ups: 1) build local assembly plant and buy workers, 2) import cars from Asia, 3) have workers install batteries and electric motors in cars, 4) Sell. BG Automotive will start with the small stuff: cheap, low speed electric vehicles with a 35 mph top speed. Then they plan to come out with an exclusive highway speed electric vehicle by late 2009. Here is a more in depth article by a Philadephia newspaper. And here is BG Automotive’s website. Here’s hoping this Pennsylvania company succeeds.
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When EV startups go wrong (Spark EV)
The electric automobile industry seems to a have wild, wild west aura about it right now, with its brave, independent startups and entrepreneurs, gold diggers, snake-oil salesmen, and vigilante policing. This atmosphere will continue until the big guns decide to take over and crush the little guys.
But for now, we have companies like Spark EV. Apparently, it was run by a guy in his basement, but still managed to make VentureBeat’s “30 electric car companies ready to take over the road” It mainly just consisted of a guy buying electric cars from China and selling them to dealerships in America; not rocket science. Well, homeboy couldn’t operate at the speed of business and the dealerships got mad over undelivered cars. Mad enough to press charges and effectively end our guy’s operation. But before this, he did create enough hype to be recognized on the world stage with his computer generated image of the Comet concept (see above, it was supposed to be released early 2008). Did he even have the wheels yet? Was it really going be fabricated, or was he a snake oil salesman looking for investors? We’ll never know, you can make your own educated guess from the Spark EV site, which now is nothing but a spiteful tale written by the CEO about his company’s demise. Speaking about yourself in the third person in fairy tale format never helps your credibility. I don’t know if this story is encouraging because it seems as though anyone can start an electric vehicle business, or disappointing because some of the major players in the ev market are such shady operations.
On Alan Cocconi
If you follow electric cars you need to be familiar with Alan Cocconi. As you can plainly see from the picture above, he’s kind of a badass. He is predominantly responsible for the technology found in the GM EV1; which was ahead of its time, or technology today is behind the times depending on how you look at it. In his garage he fabricated what was basically a 100,000 watt stereo amplifier that would allow the EV1 to travel 90 miles on a charge, go 0-60 in 7.9 seconds, and have an ungoverned top speed of 123 mph on the test track. And this was before Lithium-Ion batteries were viable; the EV1 started out with plain old Lead-Acid batteries. To this day, first generation EV1’s would still be completely cutting edge and capable electric cars. The EV1 was only leased, but estimated retail was $30,000- $40,000. This lease agreement allowed GM to take them back to be subsequently crushed, but we got the movie, Who Killed the Electric Car?, out of the whole ordeal.
Anyways, so what happened to Alan? Well he’s still in the electric car business. Unfortunately he has not been contracted to work on major project to the extent he did at GM. But the company he founded in 1992, AC Propulsion, is a major player in the electric car market today. The first AC Propulsion Tzero was built in 1996. Like the EV1, the Tzero had a range of about 90 miles, but could rocket from 0-60 in 4 seconds, making it the first electric supercar. By 2003, a second generation Tzero was born, packing lightweight Lithium-Ion batteries instead of Lead-Acid. This gave the Tzero an ev range of a whopping 300 miles. If that wasn’t enough, a trailer mounted generator could be attached to the back to extend the range even further. Seen here:
Well the Tzero never made it to production, unfortunately. Out of the Tzero, and the potential of the Lithium Ion battery, came the concept for the eBox. Basically, AC Propulsion converts customer-owned Scion xBs by removing the internal combustion engine and related components and installing the AC Propulsion electric drive system and battery. You can do this now, but you have to provide the $15K Scion and another $55K for them to convert it. Undoubtedly, if AC Propulsion operated on a larger scale, this could be done for less than half that. Tom Hanks was pretty enthused about this one:
But the real legacy of AC Propulsion and Alan Cocconi stems from that 100,000 watt amp. The AC Propulsion drivetrain that Cocconi developed has evolved, and is now used in the Venturi Fetish, Wrightspeed X1, and the Tesla Roadster. All of which are on the cutting edge of electric vehicle technology and have inspired others to design future concepts.