Lee Hart wrote: > > Anyone who tries to market a 50 mile range auto is doomed to failure >> in the marketplace. Joe sixpack just will not purchase such an auto. > >That all depends on your definition of "failure". Joe Sixpack may not be >your customer, but there are thousands of other people who *would* be. >Even such terrible EVs as the Citicars sold by the thousands.
To be more precise, 7500 Citicars/ComutaCars were sold in a seven year span. (Some sources put the figure considerably lower. See, e.g., http://www.didik.com/citicar.htm.) In any case, that works out to about 1,000 per year - in a time when gas was not cheap, there were no competing EVs, and compact cars were still a new thing. The selling price of a Citicar was about $4500. That was somewhat higher than your average gas car at the time, but not exceedingly so - about like a Prius is now, I suppose. It was not close to double the cost, as the EV1 or Solectria Force were. And the company did not succeed. Production ended for good in 1980, and the company was sold in 1986 for about $200,000. >Thousands per year is a failure for Ford Motor Company, but a runaway >success for a small company. "Runaway" success might be overstating a bit, but a small company might be able to sustain profitability at that rate, if they could keep the market price low enough and the production costs reasonable. It would take a sizable capital investment with the expectation of a relatively low rate of return, though. I suppose we should ask Rick Woodbury. He's the one trying to do something like this. If you got your $15mil investment, Rick, what do you think the rate of return might be, given the market research you've done? -- -Adam
