Feel Good Cars, based in Toronto, has completed the ZENN (Zero Emission - No Noise) production prototype electric vehicle and is raising money to commence full manufacturing and sales. The ZENN is based on a proven European diesel vehicle, the MC-1 built by Microcar of France. The MC-1, less the engine, drive train and fuel system, will be imported to Canada by FGC where the electric drive system and batteries will be installed.
Ian Clifford, 42, has 20 years experience as a marketing strategist, multimedia producer and commercial photographer. He was a co-founder of an Internet services firm which he and his partners had the good sense to sell at the height of the tech bubble. Ian founded Feel Good Cars in the summer of 2000 and has been driving a ZENN prototype in Toronto year-round for the past two years. Ian has a bachelor of fine arts from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
Vaughan: General Motors already tried an electric car in California in the '90s and bailed out. Why would you be successful when mighty GM wasn't?
Clifford: It depends on what defines success. If you don't want something to succeed, it won't. The GM car, the EV1, was successful according to the consumers who had the cars. The vehicles were only available for lease, not for sale (I should know I tried to buy one on several occasions) and they were recalled just around the time that GM decided to sue the government of California (CARB, the California Air Resources Board) for its anti-pollution laws. They decided to recall the cars and crush them.
The lease owners had organized protests, vigils and sit-ins in order to try and convince GM to sell them the cars. GM instead decided to spend money shipping them to Mesa, Ariz., for crushing instead of accepting $1.9-million that they were offered to sell the 100 (out of 800 leased in the Phoenix and Southern California areas) cars, from Burbank, Calif., to their owners. This decision was made by Rick Wagoner, GM chairman. The L.A. Times published an article asking him to resign. GM decided to pull its regular ads from the paper.
In early March, protesters had a month-long, round-the-clock vigil in Mesa to protest the vehicles destruction. 100 people offered $24,000 for each car. So, despite the statement from GM that public response was disappointing, the protests and other tactics owners used showed that the people who had the cars loved them.
GM made a statement that they were going to focus on hybrid technology instead and that the cars did not sell in the types of heavy volumes that GM needs to declare success. FGC's sales expectations are not as high as GM's, to them success is defined in the hundreds of thousands of vehicles sold, ours in the thousands.
Vaughan: How did you manage to raise $5-million of other people's money to get ready to produce an electric car that's not legal on any road or street in Canada?
Clifford: Our initial market for the ZENN is the United States, where our vehicles can be driven on-road in 45 of the 50 states. Our investors are smart and they see the markets that currently exist as well as the direction of the market in the near future.
In Canada, B.C. is the only province that currently allows low-speed urban vehicles (LSVs) on the road. So Canada is way behind the U.S. in allowing progressive, non-polluting forms of transportation onto our roads. And this from a country that is a signatory of the Kyoto Accord! It's frustrating.
There isn't a province from which we have not received dealer inquiries, and public interest in the vehicles is strong. Our biggest market is in the USA, secondarily in Central and South America as well as Asia.
