Five reasons why Renovo could be the next American electric carmaker

Building one car is easy. Welding a chassis, bolting in an engine, hammering sheet metal — these are skills that thousands of people possess, and many regularly put them to use for just such ends. It's building more than one car, especially serial production of a model that's supposed to be modern, safe and powered by a new energy source, where the hurdles often become insurmountable.

Outside of Tesla, no other electric-car start-up has come close to full production, and the list of the fallen EV hopefuls runs to more than 20 in the past decade alone. So what makes Renovo — a California start-up hawking not just an everyday car, but a $529,000 supercar — any more likely to survive, let alone thrive? After riding in the Renovo Coupe and literally kicking tires, there are five reasons to take it seriously:

1. Renovo actually built a car: Most EV start-ups never let outsiders actually ride in a test vehicle. Renovo invited us to ride shortly after the reveal in Pebble Beach, during a drive where CEO Chris Heiser did not hold back or baby his machine. The mule wasn't finished, and featured the big red "kill" button that engineers always place in test machines — a welcome sign of a car that's actively under development rather than merely a static showpiece.

2. The Shelby Daytona body/chassis: Heiser and team have learned much from Tesla's success, the most important being that there's no need to start from scratch. Tesla's first model, the Roadster, was an imported Lotus that the company retrofitted. By using the modern CSX9000 Shelby Daytona chassis and body still built in Nevada by Carroll Shelby's shop, Renovo makes the same shortcut — it doesn't have to re-engineer a chassis or hire designers, focusing instead on the power systems and software that will determine whether it succeeds.