The Sparrow flies again as an electric car (w/images) - ecomento.com
Mike Corbin made his name as the manufacturer of comfy custom seats for motorcycles. Then one day, he got an idea to design a small, efficient, single seat commuter car with three wheels. He named his creation the Sparrow and showed it off at the San Francisco auto show in 1996. The dream of building a small, maneuverable urban commuter car is one shared by many would-be entrepreneurs. After all, why sit in traffic in a 3 ton SUV that gets 12 mpg when you can zip in and out of the city and park almost anywhere in a car that is hardly bigger than a motorcycle. Instead of selling a few high priced, high profit cars, sell lots of low priced, low profit vehicles instead. If Corbin was afraid that people would mock his odd little car, he needn’t have worried. But Corbin Motors was a tiny shop, not a factory and had no way to fulfill customer demand. Our single biggest problem was everybody loved the car, but then we didn’t give it to them. Corbin Motors produced 289 cars before it got wiped out by the global economic downturn of 2003 and went bankrupt. Myers Motors bought the assets of the company, but it too went belly up and sold out to ElectraMeccanica, a British Columbia company owned by Jerry Kroll who has experience building electric motors in Silicon Valley for NASA. Source: ecomento.com
