It's been a while since last posting..
Here I will try to tell some key points what has happened in the eCorolla project here in Finland. I know that I promised to write Part II on "How to start an eCars - Now! project in my country" weeeks ago. Sorry for that! Here I have to reveal some personal stuff. I have been home with my younger son Leo for 1,5 years. During that time I had more hours for eCars than today. I have now been working full-day in somewhere completely different. - That is to say Part II will come when ready and at that point we will offer you some "keys-in-your-hands-ready" IT stuff by which you can easily launch a simple version of the eCars - Now! project in your country.
How an open source project can get stuck into financing problems?
Yes, it has happened to us. When we started, pretty soon the Norwegian Enviro Elbilsag came and said that they would finance the prototype. At that point we hadn't even begun to think of the funding because we thought getting the first 500 names would take at least six months. - Both wrong!
500 names came in eleven days and the Norwegian funding didn't materialize. There was a very strange set of manouvers played inside-and-out Fevt (Finnish Electric Vehicle Technologies). You see, the man who started this, Jukka Järvinen, started also Fevt. Suddenly Fevt was to make the eCorollas for the Norwegians. And then not. And then back again.
All this created much confusion in the open source project team: What would be the use of making the eCorolla if the Fevt is going to make it anyway? This cliffhanger lasted almost half a year. But there was yet another business-is-weird set that was holding us back -and forth again..
In April I personally opened discussion with a billion euros Finnish company if they would fund the first prototype. At first it all went like a dance, but then.. Probably what happened was that so many sections of the company got interested of the project that internal discussion took months. And between those months there were the looong holidays of the big bosses. ;-)
At the moment the sponsorship deal is still not closed. The official EV association of Finland, which had to came in to help as a legal entity (that eCars - Now! is not), had also to make its own ramifications and reporting structures. Now the billion-euros-company is offering us a paper that is basically secret and honestly that feels like poison to me. We will see if they can grow to opennes.
We are also starting a grass-roots financing model with a small car-sharing company which is looking very promising. We might or might not close the deal with the giga-company, but we will surely make the deal with the shoestring company. So finance is on the way. And the sum? - Ridiculous 30 000 euros, which is a double ridiculous sum since the target price for a production eCorolla is 27 500, only about two thousand euros more! - But I guess there still is the risk of not getting the thing run in the first place. The burden of proof lays in our hands.
Now some good news:
- Yesterday we got our first concrete Corolla to work with. It is a crash-car, so it can not become the prototype. Yet it is crucial, since much of the work is in reverse-engineering the workings of the drive computer(s) and that can be done also with a cheap crash-car.
- Earlier on Jukka Järvinen founded a company Electric Vehicle X, which is solely concentrated on conversion business. The eCars - Now! community has helped Jukka with building his facilities and Jukka / EvX will offer his expertise, garage and equipment freely into the use for the eCorolla project.
- Norwegian Enviro Elbilsag came to fund this after all, but in a slightly different set. They invested in Jukka's EvX and have been testing Azure Dynamics' motors with Citroen Berlingo in Norway that will give the project here much valuable information.
Now, to get back on the "How to start an eCars - Now! project in my country, Part II"…
First, I envisioned a grand system, where in the core would be a global database of people, questionnaire answers etc. A system that would combine different eCar model projects, country sister projects and language profiles into a single matrix..
Today it seems that that's still the case where we should be heading but instead of trying to build it all at once, we will start small and build from that. After all, we are all making this on our free will, part time and may have the time and energy only for a gradual evolution.
So.. I will post the Part II and with that some tools that you can begin with.
It will be simple.
