What Is Elio Stock Trading For Today?

[Rickb]

What you need to remember is that Elio was told a number of times that building a tube frame chassis and SMC body was way too expensive for mass production of a super cheap car. I believe they knew this a long time ago and thus when the $16M was raised, that money went into the CAD time, Engineering and tooling to just make the unibody chassis. 2016 was the banner year for Engineering as they spent $26M that year. The grand total of R&D is only $62M that counts 2009 to 2019. In 2016 they made 5 unibody chassis and zero bodies but they ran out of money. As Paul admitted, they burned through the cash as fast as possible.

One other thing to remember, the reservations only brought in $28M and the IPO $16M. The rest were from other investors and loans. As I've said before, Elio never had enough coming in to keep the business moving forward. Thus 2016 was the final year of any progress. From 2017 to today, it's just been looking for more money. Elio realized that there was never enough interest in the car to make it happen for the budget that they came up with. When you still need $531M and you only have raised about $110M to date, it shows that the company has been seriously underfunded from day one. I've admitted this before, if Elio got the 65K reservations in the first 6-12 months, they would have demonstrated that the demand was there. Instead it took them various incentives to get to 65K and that took 52 months to do.

With Elio dropping off the face of the earth and getting barely any new reservations and no press whatsoever, it's impossible that an angel investor is coming in to write the check that will fund it to completion. Paul and company did their best but they knew the money was never there. This is why they have stopped everything except for a recycled blog entry every two weeks. They decided to not spend the money on a SEC filing. So, it's obvious that the company is just Paul and it's located out of his house. He and I are the same then. Both have a BSME and both have a single person business run out of their house. I assume he's just doing what I do. Being a consultant and taking on various jobs all in hopes that the phone will ring with a Bill Gates type person ready to fund the project.

Based on the $16 Million IPO funded Elio prototype build experience comments made by one of the build team members, your statements, “Elio and Company did their best”, “The money wasn’t there”, and “He and I are the same, both having a BSME, is an attempt to BSME and others. With that said, The Elio Marketing Team did their very best work. It was an award winning EM Elio Marketing and Fundraising Strategy with no serious engineering, research, & development.

 

[Karg]

As I have been saying all along, Elio never intended to built a single production vehicle. It was an overly elaborate but brilliant scheme to bilk both reservation holders (like myself) and investors out of their hard earned money, and it worked. Paul and his buddies made millions. You want proof, just check out their sales pitch on their still operational website. And with that I bid thee a fond farewell.

 

[Made in USA]

I asked this question to Elio today and will post response:


We have noticed that Elio Motors is no longer making SEC reports.

Could you please explain?

Thank you.


Note: I expect more of the same "read the blog" or we can't comment right now type reponse, but who knows.

 

[RSchneider]

Based on the $16 Million IPO funded Elio prototype build experience comments made by one of the build team members, your statements, “Elio and Company did their best”, “The money wasn’t there”, and “He and I are the same, both having a BSME, is an attempt to BSME and others. With that said, The Elio Marketing Team did their very best work. It was an award winning EM Elio Marketing and Fundraising Strategy with no serious engineering, research, & development.

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I think the difference is that I've been involved with projects like Elio before and know lots of others that have too. being an engineer makes to a target for dreamers because they dream but have no way to make it a reality due to the lack of funding. This happens all of the time in real estate. People buy property or a building and never really figured out the cost of making their dream work. So they try and in the end half butt everything and literally run out of money and then the project sits. If they would have not had the pie in the sky idea of what they could do, then they would have had a chance.

What people do not realize is that Elio was trying to make the car too cheap for what he was trying to offer. You cannot offer electric windows, airbags, ABS, TC, traction control and AC if you want to make it cheap. You definitely can't do it with 125K per year and a tube frame. Spending money developing a motor is not the way to go either. These items could have been easily fixed very early on (before the crowdfunding started). It needed to be a simple three wheeler with a basic off the shelf engine and transmission. No airbags, electric windows/locks, ABS, TC stability and make AC an option. It needed to be at least $12K for the base model and only just a few options. Prove the concept and make 5K the first year. Once the revenue comes in, then they could work on the next upgraded model. Company proves it's viable and thus they can progress.

Elio promised way too much from the get go and that killed the project. People are hardwired that the Elio will cost $7450, it will have Airbags, TC, Stability, electric locks, electric windows, AC as standard. They also expect to custom order the car with a la carte options. Then the Elio must be made in America with Americans and have 90% North American content. That's the corner Elio has painted themselves into. Anything that deviates from that becomes a problem for many. Many didn't care when it went from $5900 to $6800 because they never put any money down. When Elio went from up from $6800 it was like a massive big deal. So you can see, the car buying public are very fickle and when you can't deliver on what you said, you will be bombarded with it via social media.

Elio was never out to scam anyone. This is a way too complex project that has gone on for too long. There are much easier ways to scam people. It's too many promises and the spec package is not realistic for the price quoted. It's that most have zero knowledge of manufacturing and creating brand new products from the ground up. They just believe whatever they are told. Many times the people telling you, have the lack of knowledge of pulling off what they want anyway due to it not being doable. In the end, there's a reason why the funding has only trickled in. The money guys do not believe it will work with the current specifications. Change the specs, then it'll work. It's that who here is willing to put up with an alternate spec Elio. I have a feeling, it'll be in the single digits.

 

[Samuel Gompers]

RS, sometimes it feels like two different people are posting to your account. You post that Paul did nothing wrong, then you give us a long list of the things he did wrong.

The "scam" argument has been going on for at least 6 years. It would be legally difficult to prove a scam, and there is no money left for compensation, so that is a dead-end street. For grins, the questions would seem to be: 1) If it were a "scam", what would Paul have done differently? and 2) If Paul "reallly" wanted to get the vehicle in to production, what would he have done differently? Your first three paragraphs tell us what Paul might have done to actually get the trike into production.

One of the fascinating things about the Elio story is that it is like a version of the old "liars vs truthtellers" IQ puzzle on steroids. When you examine the evidence, there is evidence for many disparate conclusions. Were the 4 "must-haves" a noble goal, or a poison pill? What about the final "locked-in pricing"? Was it a bold venture that only failed because of a few high-risk dice rolls, a cynical plot well-covered by legal mumbo-jumbo, or a simple business plan that just didn't work out? Those questions have piqued my curiosity for years, and still do to some extent. I have my own conclusions, but recognize that there may be much that I missed.

 

[Samuel Gompers]

Remember, Paul was never fined. The Elio company WAS fined. Paul doesn't have to pay anything. He can just let the company implode and walk away.

LOL Paul is the company, but you are correct that he will most likely walk away without paying the fines personally. His "fine" is the total devaluation of what was once a billion dollar company (at least theoretically). It does appear that he wound up better off financially that where he was in late 2012.

 

[Elio Amazed]

For weeks, it's felt like we've been doing the post-game wrap up show in here.

 

[Ty]

LOL Paul is the company, but you are correct that he will most likely walk away without paying the fines personally. His "fine" is the total devaluation of what was once a billion dollar company (at least theoretically). It does appear that he wound up better off financially that where he was in late 2012.

It sure did seem irresponsible to spend all the funding without getting many (any) production-ready vehicles made. It is quite mind boggling how they couldn't get to at least limited production by this point.

 

[Made in USA]

If it were a scam, then why did they stop counting the reservations instead of trying to get more deposits? Would seem to me that if they hit 100,000 they would profit from the scam instead of having it stall out. If they had put the prototype on display more I'm sure they could have gotten many more reservations. Unless of course the master plan was to only obtain a certain amount and then let it die so that it didn't look like a scam. Perhaps they knew that a couple hundred thousand reservations still would not be enough to finance the operation?

 

[RSchneider]

If it were a scam, then why did they stop counting the reservations instead of trying to get more deposits? Would seem to me that if they hit 100,000 they would profit from the scam instead of having it stall out. If they had put the prototype on display more I'm sure they could have gotten many more reservations. Unless of course the master plan was to only obtain a certain amount and then let it die so that it didn't look like a scam. Perhaps they knew that a couple hundred thousand reservations still would not be enough to finance the operation?

If I was going to scam all of you, then I would have done it much easier. I would have made a great website. Then make a bunch of YouTube videos of all of my friends driving my two cars I had built. Then I would have set up a tour and done it at various racetracks around the country where you would be able to drive around places like Daytona in one of my cars at 50-60 mph. Then do something of a solo course in the parking lot. Had 3-4 people lined up to take your money. Repeat this for 3 years. All while cranking out press releases of various progress updates. I'd even rent a building for a month and set up where I'm going to build the car. After that, I'd start to hint that the government is making it hard on me and it's becoming really hard to make this car you drove at your favorite NASCAR track, not a reality. Then I'd finally declare bankruptcy and walk away.

That's the way you scam people. Do much less and then blame the government on your failure. As we all know, everyone loves a conspiracy theory and thus it'll pass for most of you. All while I walk away making just enough to live a good life and then create the next scam. If Paul was out to scam people, he was a complete idiot by spending way too much time, money and effort to do it. He could have made 10X the amount of money in half the time. If he was really out to scam people, then he will be one of the dumbest scammers on the planet and will go into the history books of doing it.

Also, the exact plan I just mentioned (not using cars but another product) is exactly what I watched someone else do about 20 years ago. He got away because he had the legal knowhow to protect himself.