It's been years since Elio Motors promised one of the world's most affordable cars. Why is ElioMotors having so many issues with their company? Does anyone own one of their vehicles by now or is everyone still waiting?
Good question! Thanks for the A2A.Does anyone own one? No, they have never produced a single commercial product. Only prototypes with dubious capabilities.The Polaris Slingshot was a far fetched concept that made it from concept to reality in a much faster time span than anything Elio has even considered attempting. In a nut shell the sling shot is a variant of what Elio was probably trying to produce but hasn’t ever succeeded.Why the problems? It’s all speculation but the analysis by professional and amateur armchair theorists like myself, think it is gross (borderline criminal) mismanagement from day 1.It’s easy to make big promises, it’s a lot harder to deliver them.Purely on the time to market metric alone Elio’s goal of producing a product for 9000–10000 dollars died by virtue of inflationary forces. The original claim was ‘we’d deliver a car that would cost 7000 dollars’ I think, then the costs went up from there. The cost of materials from the time Elio launched and started accepting pre-orders to present day, must have risen astronomically.It is at the point now where anyone who paid in full for the product, if they ever get one will cost the company considerably more per a unit to produce than it was originally estimated at time of order.I am seeing what I believe is an increasing trend among start-ups to not produce an actual product, but rather a steady paycheck for the select few employees of the company. Sure they may have promised us some type of physical goods, but years and years later after soaking investors for millions, there’s no product delivered. The end result tends to be only a few happy company executives who jump ship after they figure there’s no more money to be made here.That’s my theory on what i’m seeing occur in start-ups in the last 8 years.Companies i’ve suspected of doing this pump and dump type scam:MIITOSKULLY ARElio MotorsMission MotorcyclesThe entire leadership efforts could be summed up as one decade long cocaine fueled binge on other peoples money. They went from being hundreds of millions in the black to only having maybe 3000 dollars in the bank as of 18 months ago?For further verbiage on Elio and relevant links to what is going on with them now, I refer you to my other answer regarding Elio.Rick Ross's answer to When can Elio Motors be pronounced a scam?
Will the Elio Car ever get started?
As Chris Coleman states, it remains to be seen how it pans out. I’ve been one of the first advocates and even have a deposit down on one for close to 5 years now should they ever get built. The issue to me is they have been making promises for quite a while and then have altered them a little bit. I can understand that things happen in business and also at this point in time the USA doesn’t appear to be the friend of the manufacturing sector any more. Anyway, when it first was introduced the vehicle was going to be $6,800, as stated here:And later they were even saying that manufacturing would be starting, this Christmas ad states you’ll be driving your Elio next year:And to me another concern is last year I decided to up my deposit to the maximum of $1,000, (the incentive here is you are credited half of your deposit as a bonus, so with a down payment of $1K you get $500 taken off the price you pay). I had a problem doing this online so I sent them an email stating my difficulty, and the email went unanswered for a week or so, until I called them. The conversation on the phone went OK until I just wanted to verify that my base price would be $6,300 and not $6,800. Well not so fast! Now it turns out there was a recent notification in their blog that in order to qualify for a $6,800 base price you had to commit to a non-refundable deposit by a certain deadline. The price is now $7,300. To me this was the last of the batch of red flags that all may not be well so I decided to not tempt fate with my money at that point.So at this point I have no clue if these vehicles will ever get built. If they do not I can tell you it is not because of the fault of Paul Elio or his team from what I can see, but rather it is from the extremely lackadaisical attitude our country has taken in regards to producing items nowadays.
Can some people get rich from equity crowdfunding?
Yes. Here’s how it could work – invest in ten equity crowdfunding opportunities at $2,000 each –an outlay of $20,000 (not an unreasonably large sum in the context of theamount we invest in property and retirement portfolios across a lifetime). Eight of these companies completely fail, one of them is a moderate success and doubles in value, one of them is a large success and increases in value by twenty times. This would see the portfolio rise in value to $44,000 – a return of more than twice the initial outlay, despite a failure rate of 80%. This is the sort of outcome venture capitalists hope for – they invest in many opportunities, expecting most will fail, but that the successes will tend to be large enough to make up for the failures. The proportion of right and wrong does not matter - what counts is the accumulated payoff. It is also possible all ten could fail. That’s a risk, and a non-trivial one at that,which is why it is also important to limit the exposure to early stage companies to a small proportion of a total portfolio. To be clear, the vast majority of a portfolio should remain safe. Never be exposed to the possibility of losing everything. Nassim Taleb (author of Antifragile) talks about the merits of a “barbell” strategy in investing – the numbers he uses are 90% in safe assets, while 10% can be put into high-risk venture capital, hoping for the big payoff. Crowdfunding makes this strategy possible for mum-and-dad investors.Nathan Rose |http://www.assembleadvisory.com | nathan@assembleadvisory.com
Which are the most important philosophers to ever live, asides from the ancient Greeks, who else should I read?
If you are not interested in logic and theology you can skip medieval philosophy, which I find beautiful and important, but enough recap in modern philosophy. (Biggest names. However are Thomas Aquinas, Anselm from Aosta, Ockam, Duns Scoto)Modern philosophy starts with Descartes (along with Galileo and Bacon). YOU MUST READ DESCARTES. It's enough to read the beautiful “Meditations on First Philosophy”, it is a path changing opera, everything that comes later will be against or in favor but ALWAYS related to. You find thought on the famous COGITO after in Kant, Hegel and more close in time in Rilke, Dennet, Husserl.So here are few names of the great thinkers of modern philosophy: Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel.Important “minor” philosophers: Kiekegaard, Nietzsche, Simone Weil, Ludwig Wittgenstein.(my “philosophic father” is Augistino of Hyppo, he is a Father of Christianity and wrote in IV century a.e.v. so is more ancient than medieval, but is not Greek, so I suggest you to not miss him, at least his CONFESSIONES)