After finishing several hours of research on a variety of companies, I'm exhausted, but excited. I think I've discovered something about Detroit Electric that more people should know. Now, I might be a fool saying this, but I don't think anyone else has covered this news (I think Cleantechnica or EVobsession would have mentioned this if they knew).
First of all, does anyone remember ZAP! Motor Company? ZAP was an early electric car company, or so they marketed themselves. Really, referring to them as an electric car company gives them too much credit. ZAP was infamous for promising new, exciting technologies in the electric car space, and then never really following through[1]. ZAP was considered by many to be a massive failure, responsible for the disillusionment of many early "ecocar environentalists." Over the history of the company, they had promised over a dozen different zero-emissions vehicles, but they only ever came out with two: the ZAP scooter and the Xebra (as well as the Xebra's truck variant). The dirty secret in this that I'm going to be addressing here is that, near the end of ZAP's existence, it brought on a new member for its management board, who became one of its key figures near the end--previous Lotus CEO, Albert Lam.
Here's the thing; in 2007, Albert Lam oversaw a new joint venture with Youngman Automobile Group, a relatively small Chinese manufacturer that ZAP! had worked with before. This joint venture was created for the exclusive purpose of marketing the (planned but never released) ZAP Alias, which was meant to be a three-wheel high performance vehicle. The name of this partnership was the stunning thing. ZAP and Youngman referred to it as "Detroit Electric," a revival of an early electric car brand in the 1900s.
From here, this partnership seems to enter murky waters. After 2008, we don't really hear anything about Detroit Electric. Albert Lam had promised that ZAP would market an electric bus, a high-performance model and two family sedans under the Detroit Electric moniker, but none of these designs ever came to light. Finally, after five years, a new electric car company burst onto the scene, brandishing designs for a high-performance electric sports car based on a Lotus chassis. I am speaking, of course, of Detroit Electric (not Tesla Motors. That was 2006 or 2007, if memory serves). Are they in any way related? You'd be hard-pressed to find any sort of connection between the two. Unless... unless you were to visit Detroit Electric's website, http://detroit-electric-group.com/. If you scroll down the front page, under the part labeled "our story," there's a brief mention of who's behind the vision of the SP:01.
Albert Lam.
I can only hope that, after all these years of promising and failing, Lam keeps true to his words at 0:47 in this interview with Bloomberg.
"No one else can offer this kind of thing, because we learn from the past. We learn from mistakes of the others."
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