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Not quite the first impression I would have expected.
Phoenix-based Elio Motors has built a vehicle that isn’t exactly a car, but really isn’t a motorcycle either. Lodged somewhere in between those two classifications — although considered by many states to be a motorcycle — the 3-wheeler looks like something the Ministry of Information would have issued a low-level bureaucrat in Terry Gilliam’s classic dark comedy, “Brazil.”
Driving the vehicle took imagination, because the tandem two-seat vehicle that Paul Elio — founder and chief executive of Elio Motors — offered for a test ride in Manhattan last week was far from the one he promised would come from a Louisiana factory next year. He says he intends to sell the finished product, which he says will get 84 miles per gallon on the highway, for $6,800.
Mr. Elio had a model of an all-new 50-horsepower, 3-cylinder engine with variable valve timing, designed by IAV Automotive Engineering, sitting on a stand on the sidewalk near where the vehicle was parked. But the production engine was not ready. Elio’s test car was powered by a clattery 3-cylinder power plant pulled from a 1990 Geo Metro. Also absent, but intended for the production car, were air-conditioning, windshield wipers, power windows and door locks, an AM-FM radio and an “automated manual” transmission.
The test vehicle has a comfortable interior, although it looks as if it came out of an early-'90s Geo.
Jim Motavalli
The test vehicle has a comfortable interior, although it looks as if it came out of an early-’90s Geo.
Missing as well were a rear window and a passenger’s side door, but that’s by design. Mr. Elio said that in a car with tandem seating (the passenger sits behind the driver) there was no need for another side door, which added cost. The driver’s window rolled down with a crank, but the passenger side had only fixed glass, although Mr. Elio said the production cars would have power windows on both sides. And the rear window? He said that it would be hard to see out of one anyway, given the car’s layout, but that owners with rear vision anxiety would perhaps have that amenity available as an optional extra.
Elio Motors and the as-yet-unnamed 3-wheeler grew out of ESG Engineering, a company that Mr. Elio said he helped to found. The vehicle’s aerodynamic shape, with two outboard front wheels and a single rear wheel in the pinched tail of a wind-cheating fuselage, bears some resemblance to the Edison2, a vehicle that won its class in the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize competition (although that car has four wheels).
“In 2008, oil prices were going through the roof, but instead of getting mad I decided to do something about it,” said Mr. Elio, a 1995 graduate of the GMI Engineering and Management Institute in Flint, Mich. (now Kettering University). He figured that by placing two occupants in tandem, he could cut down on drag and increase efficiency.
Mr. Elio said that 90 percent of the content in the front-wheel-drive production car would come from North America. The company has raised $50 million for the venture from private investors, he said, outlining a production goal of 250,000 vehicles per year.
This rendering shows what the vehicle's interior is supposed to look like in production models.
Elio Motors
This rendering shows what the vehicle’s interior is supposed to look like in production models.
“We will launch in 2014 and ramp up to that goal,” he said, adding that the company had already received 3,000 advance orders. Indeed, people walking past the vehicle in Midtown seemed interested. Many walked around to the driver’s side (after learning that the passenger side window doesn’t roll down) to ask Mr. Elio for his business card through the narrow gap between the B-pillar and the front seat — the rear passenger’s only access to the outside world.
Mr. Elio said the cars were to be built at a former General Motors plant in Caddo Parish, La., near Shreveport, where the company planned to hire 1,500 workers.
A brief ride around Times Square in the vehicle paid no compliments to the engineering of the Geo Metro motor or the stopgap manual transmission (which featured a vague, loose-fitting shifter mounted to the right of the driver’s seat). Passers-by who didn’t see the vehicle coming certainly heard it as the short-piped Geo mill belched out its anemic tractor growl. The finished car will supposedly have a 0-to-60 m.p.h. time of 9.6 seconds and a top speed of 107 m.p.h., but not the test vehicle — currently the sole Elio that can be driven.
Instrumentation was basic and also borrowed from an old econobox, but Mr. Elio said that, too, was temporary while the production panel was being readied. The driver sits very low in the car, although there was a lever to raise the seat height, which Mr. Elio said was intended to increase driver visibility of the front wheels.
Mr. Elio said the car had the same ground clearance as a contemporary Ford Mustang. The streets around Times Square are not much of a test track, but the steering was relatively light and the brakes worked – just well enough. In a couple of those hard-braking situations all too common in Midtown, the test car’s lack of power brakes was very apparent. Mr. Elio said the production car would have them. The suspension was agricultural in character, and Manhattan’s standard potholes and lumpy road patches sometimes made for a rough ride.
Paul Elio, founder and chief executive of Elio Motors, said he got the idea for the 3-wheeler when oil prices rose in 2008.
Jim Motavalli
Paul Elio, founder and chief executive of Elio Motors, said he got the idea for the 3-wheeler when oil prices rose in 2008.
Like the Smart Fortwo, the vehicle felt larger inside than it looked outside. Climbing into the back was initially awkward, but once inside, the rear passenger has surprisingly good legroom and headroom. The driver’s seat did not feel cramped, and after a few minutes at the wheel it was easy to forget you were driving something so different from everything else on the road.
Some of the claims about the car remain to be verified. Mr. Elio said it would achieve 84 m.p.g. on the highway and 49 in the city, but those numbers are based on the company’s computer projections for an engine that has not made its way into the car — not real world Environmental Protection Agency figures. A handout Elio Motors has been circulating says the vehicle has a five-star safety rating, which the company later recanted in an e-mail. Mr. Elio said that such a rating was in fact “anticipated” and based upon computer simulations. He showed the simulations with his iPhone, and they made it look as if the vehicle’s occupants could survive a truck bumper broadside at 35 m.p.h. Mr. Elio said that some of a planned batch of 25 prototypes would be used for actual crash testing.
As a 3-wheeler, the vehicle can be registered as a motorcycle and thus avoid stringent federal crash testing standards, but Mr. Elio says he wants the car to meet them anyway. The vehicle weighs about 1,100 pounds, he said, so it is important to know what happens in accidents.
Sales of the vehicle will most certainly hinge on whether buyers are required to get a motorcycle license. Chip Stempeck, Elio Motors’ vice president for marketing, said that every state except Kansas would require that the vehicle be registered as a motorcycle based on federal vehicle classifications. So in some states, a person who does not already have a motorcycle license will have to pass that state’s motorcycle safety test, possibly on a 2-wheeled motorcycle. That could be a deal breaker for some people.
Then there’s the helmet issue. Mr. Stempeck said that while most states would not require the driver to wear a helmet, New York, North Carolina, Nebraska, Mississippi, Missouri, West Virginia and the District of Columbia will. But with a steel roll cage, antilock braking, three air bags and stability control (out of those features, the prototype has only the roll cage installed), Mr. Stempeck said Elio Motors was hopeful that states could be persuaded that the vehicle should be exempt from full motorcycle regulations.
Elio’s prototype vehicle, although fun to drive, gave the impression more of a really good backyard project than of something that would be ready for production soon. The murky array of registration hurdles aside, it will be easier to rate the car as something that could be a serious contender once all of Elio’s promised features make it from concept to reality.
Phoenix-based Elio Motors has built a vehicle that isn’t exactly a car, but really isn’t a motorcycle either. Lodged somewhere in between those two classifications — although considered by many states to be a motorcycle — the 3-wheeler looks like something the Ministry of Information would have issued a low-level bureaucrat in Terry Gilliam’s classic dark comedy, “Brazil.”
Driving the vehicle took imagination, because the tandem two-seat vehicle that Paul Elio — founder and chief executive of Elio Motors — offered for a test ride in Manhattan last week was far from the one he promised would come from a Louisiana factory next year. He says he intends to sell the finished product, which he says will get 84 miles per gallon on the highway, for $6,800.
Mr. Elio had a model of an all-new 50-horsepower, 3-cylinder engine with variable valve timing, designed by IAV Automotive Engineering, sitting on a stand on the sidewalk near where the vehicle was parked. But the production engine was not ready. Elio’s test car was powered by a clattery 3-cylinder power plant pulled from a 1990 Geo Metro. Also absent, but intended for the production car, were air-conditioning, windshield wipers, power windows and door locks, an AM-FM radio and an “automated manual” transmission.
The test vehicle has a comfortable interior, although it looks as if it came out of an early-'90s Geo.
Jim Motavalli
The test vehicle has a comfortable interior, although it looks as if it came out of an early-’90s Geo.
Missing as well were a rear window and a passenger’s side door, but that’s by design. Mr. Elio said that in a car with tandem seating (the passenger sits behind the driver) there was no need for another side door, which added cost. The driver’s window rolled down with a crank, but the passenger side had only fixed glass, although Mr. Elio said the production cars would have power windows on both sides. And the rear window? He said that it would be hard to see out of one anyway, given the car’s layout, but that owners with rear vision anxiety would perhaps have that amenity available as an optional extra.
Elio Motors and the as-yet-unnamed 3-wheeler grew out of ESG Engineering, a company that Mr. Elio said he helped to found. The vehicle’s aerodynamic shape, with two outboard front wheels and a single rear wheel in the pinched tail of a wind-cheating fuselage, bears some resemblance to the Edison2, a vehicle that won its class in the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize competition (although that car has four wheels).
“In 2008, oil prices were going through the roof, but instead of getting mad I decided to do something about it,” said Mr. Elio, a 1995 graduate of the GMI Engineering and Management Institute in Flint, Mich. (now Kettering University). He figured that by placing two occupants in tandem, he could cut down on drag and increase efficiency.
Mr. Elio said that 90 percent of the content in the front-wheel-drive production car would come from North America. The company has raised $50 million for the venture from private investors, he said, outlining a production goal of 250,000 vehicles per year.
This rendering shows what the vehicle's interior is supposed to look like in production models.
Elio Motors
This rendering shows what the vehicle’s interior is supposed to look like in production models.
“We will launch in 2014 and ramp up to that goal,” he said, adding that the company had already received 3,000 advance orders. Indeed, people walking past the vehicle in Midtown seemed interested. Many walked around to the driver’s side (after learning that the passenger side window doesn’t roll down) to ask Mr. Elio for his business card through the narrow gap between the B-pillar and the front seat — the rear passenger’s only access to the outside world.
Mr. Elio said the cars were to be built at a former General Motors plant in Caddo Parish, La., near Shreveport, where the company planned to hire 1,500 workers.
A brief ride around Times Square in the vehicle paid no compliments to the engineering of the Geo Metro motor or the stopgap manual transmission (which featured a vague, loose-fitting shifter mounted to the right of the driver’s seat). Passers-by who didn’t see the vehicle coming certainly heard it as the short-piped Geo mill belched out its anemic tractor growl. The finished car will supposedly have a 0-to-60 m.p.h. time of 9.6 seconds and a top speed of 107 m.p.h., but not the test vehicle — currently the sole Elio that can be driven.
Instrumentation was basic and also borrowed from an old econobox, but Mr. Elio said that, too, was temporary while the production panel was being readied. The driver sits very low in the car, although there was a lever to raise the seat height, which Mr. Elio said was intended to increase driver visibility of the front wheels.
Mr. Elio said the car had the same ground clearance as a contemporary Ford Mustang. The streets around Times Square are not much of a test track, but the steering was relatively light and the brakes worked – just well enough. In a couple of those hard-braking situations all too common in Midtown, the test car’s lack of power brakes was very apparent. Mr. Elio said the production car would have them. The suspension was agricultural in character, and Manhattan’s standard potholes and lumpy road patches sometimes made for a rough ride.
Paul Elio, founder and chief executive of Elio Motors, said he got the idea for the 3-wheeler when oil prices rose in 2008.
Jim Motavalli
Paul Elio, founder and chief executive of Elio Motors, said he got the idea for the 3-wheeler when oil prices rose in 2008.
Like the Smart Fortwo, the vehicle felt larger inside than it looked outside. Climbing into the back was initially awkward, but once inside, the rear passenger has surprisingly good legroom and headroom. The driver’s seat did not feel cramped, and after a few minutes at the wheel it was easy to forget you were driving something so different from everything else on the road.
Some of the claims about the car remain to be verified. Mr. Elio said it would achieve 84 m.p.g. on the highway and 49 in the city, but those numbers are based on the company’s computer projections for an engine that has not made its way into the car — not real world Environmental Protection Agency figures. A handout Elio Motors has been circulating says the vehicle has a five-star safety rating, which the company later recanted in an e-mail. Mr. Elio said that such a rating was in fact “anticipated” and based upon computer simulations. He showed the simulations with his iPhone, and they made it look as if the vehicle’s occupants could survive a truck bumper broadside at 35 m.p.h. Mr. Elio said that some of a planned batch of 25 prototypes would be used for actual crash testing.
As a 3-wheeler, the vehicle can be registered as a motorcycle and thus avoid stringent federal crash testing standards, but Mr. Elio says he wants the car to meet them anyway. The vehicle weighs about 1,100 pounds, he said, so it is important to know what happens in accidents.
Sales of the vehicle will most certainly hinge on whether buyers are required to get a motorcycle license. Chip Stempeck, Elio Motors’ vice president for marketing, said that every state except Kansas would require that the vehicle be registered as a motorcycle based on federal vehicle classifications. So in some states, a person who does not already have a motorcycle license will have to pass that state’s motorcycle safety test, possibly on a 2-wheeled motorcycle. That could be a deal breaker for some people.
Then there’s the helmet issue. Mr. Stempeck said that while most states would not require the driver to wear a helmet, New York, North Carolina, Nebraska, Mississippi, Missouri, West Virginia and the District of Columbia will. But with a steel roll cage, antilock braking, three air bags and stability control (out of those features, the prototype has only the roll cage installed), Mr. Stempeck said Elio Motors was hopeful that states could be persuaded that the vehicle should be exempt from full motorcycle regulations.
Elio’s prototype vehicle, although fun to drive, gave the impression more of a really good backyard project than of something that would be ready for production soon. The murky array of registration hurdles aside, it will be easier to rate the car as something that could be a serious contender once all of Elio’s promised features make it from concept to reality.
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