Cheap EVs From Failed Startup Are Piling Up in Arizona Scrapyard

Just outside Gilbert, Arizona is a scrapyard that’s accumulating tons of a single, strange type of vehicle. Videos of the pile of three-wheeled EVs are circulating the internet, igniting speculation and rumors about why they’re being destroyed. But the reality is simple: They started breaking and couldn’t be fixed, so there was only one thing to do with them.

You’re looking at the remains of dozens of ElectraMeccanica Solo EVs, a three-wheeled commuter produced from 2018 to 2023. Initially marketed as the cheap EV solution to end them all according to The Autopian, the Solo’s appeal was severely limited by its price of $18,000 and single-seat cabin. Those (and the Solo’s three-wheeled design) wouldn’t be the reason for its undoing, however.

In August 2022, ElectraMeccanica received a complaint from a customer that their Solo had lost propulsion while driving. More reports followed in September, leading the company’s engineering team to try to diagnose and address the issue. They worked out that “a defect in the motor controller and inverter or the battery controller may cause the electric motor to shut down”—but not how to fix it. The problem was escalated to ElectraMeccanica’s executive team, which in February 2023 initiated a recall for almost every vehicle sold to customers in the United States, totaling 428 Solos.

While the recall documents suggest the company hoped to find a fix, it never manifested, and in April the company notified customers it would be buying back all affected vehicles. Since then, ElectraMeccanica was purchased by electric truck company Xos, which has shown no interest in repairing the Solos to resell them. Instead, it has evidently turned to scrapping them, which an employee of the junkyard allegedly told a visitor had to be supervised to verify the Solos’ destruction. (Author’s note: it was probably cheaper to write them all off than do anything else.)

The Drive contacted Xos seeking an official answer as to why all those EVs were sent to be crushed, rather than fixed. All Xos could share was that “Following the recall, buyback, and ElectraMeccanica’s cessation of sales, the vehicles were disposed of partly via the facility in [the] linked video. Following the acquisition by Xos, ElectraMeccanica few remaining operations have been wound down.”

It’s a shame to see a vehicle’s development culminate in its wholesale destruction, but it’s not like the ElectraMeccanica Solo was on its way toward changing the world. No single EV, no matter how radical its design or forward-thinking its creator, can hope to do that.

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