There’s a saying that goes like “third time’s a charm.” For Elio Motors, the adage changes to “fourth time’s a charm.” Yes, ladies and gents, the startup of Paul Elio has completed the chassis design for its 3-wheeler.
Elio Motors is known to bite off more than it can chew. However, the latest announcement made by the Phoenix, Arizona-based company seems credible. With the completion of the chassis design, prototypes of the 3-wheeler vehicle “will be used to complete real-world vehicle validation and ride dynamics testing and calibration, as well as safety validations, in advance of commercial production.” So far, it’s very likely that Elio Motors will make 100 pre-production cars by year-end.
Initial production, on the other hand, is slated for 2017. “Once our E-Series vehicles emerge from the pilot build, the Chassis team will conduct ride and handling development tuning to refine the vehicle's driving characteristics prior to commercial production,” declared Jeff Johnston, VP of engineering at Elio Motors.
Believe it or not, tuning specialist automotive company Roush Performance is partly responsible for the design of the chassis and suspension. Jack Roush’s team started collaborating with Elio Motors in January. Paul Elio highlights that the team has managed “at what seems like lightning speed.” Cracking job from Roush, then, albeit we would rather wish for Roush to focus on tuning Mustangs and F-150s.
Up to this point, Elio Motors has racked up 52,404 reservations for the trike. As mentioned time and time again, the 3-wheeler will be built at a former General Motors plant in Louisiana (Shreveport Operations), will hold a starting price of $6,800 excluding destination fee, and will return a scarcely believable 84 miles to the gallon (2.8 liters per 100 kilometers). Performance-wise, the ultra-economical Elio 3-wheeler is projected to hit 62 miles per hour (100 km/h) in 9.6 seconds and on to a top speed of 100 mph (160 km/h).
After a 1:43 scale model of a Ferrari 250 GTO sparked Mircea's interest for cars when he was a kid, an early internship at Top Gear sealed his career path. He's most interested in muscle cars and American trucks, but he takes a passing interest in quirky kei cars as well. Full profile
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