- An Arizona scrapyard has been blowing up on social media for playing home to a trashed pile of Solos
- The three-wheeled EV was originally built in B.C., with a range of 160 km and a too-high price tag
- Production moved to China and then Arizona; in 2023, those cars were recalled and bought back
History is littered with stories of automotive start-ups that couldn’t survive, and now it seems one Arizona scrapyard is literally littered with them, too. A video on TikTok shows a number of like-new all-electric ElectraMeccanica Solos piled up in a heap, and apparently the only parts anyone can buy off them is their seats.
It’s the final fallout for the single-passenger three-wheeled battery-powered vehicles, which were created when Jerry Kroll, an entrepreneur based in Vancouver, decided he wanted to build a car of his own and joined up with sports-car builder Intermeccanica to create a venture dubbed ElectraMeccanica. The first model was a decidedly odd-looking prototype, and we at Driving.ca got to drive it. The finalized Solo was unveiled in 2016 and, once again, Driving.ca got behind the wheel of the pre-production model.
The single-passenger EV was originally hand-made in New Westminster, B.C. for Canadian sales, but with plans to move into the larger U.S. market, production switched to China. And that assembly line stopped after the company began building the Solo in Mesa, Arizona.
The company certainly gave it its best shot, including a display at the 2021 Los Angeles Auto Show, but the odds weren’t in its favour. For one thing, the Solo earned its name because it could only hold one person; and for its Canadian introduction, the cost was a relatively high $19,888. When production moved to Arizona, the Solo retained its 160-km range, but its price equivalent in Canadian dollars had risen to about $23,200.
Even all that might have been surmountable, until numerous Solos suddenly stopped running and no one could figure out why. In 2023, ElectraMeccanica voluntarily recalled the vehicles it had built in China and Arizona – the few Canadian-made ones used different architecture and components and were exempt from the recall – and from there, finally offered to buy back all 429 of them from their owners, and discontinued the car.
From there, it planned to build a four-wheeled EV. It backed out of a merger with a British electric and hydrogen truck firm that later went bankrupt. Then, in March of 2024, ElectraMeccanica was bought by electric truck manufacturer Xos Inc., based in Los Angeles. That company is relatively small also – it delivered 110 trucks in the fourth quarter of 2023, and that was a record for it – but its customers include FedEx and Canada Post.
In a particularly admirable example of corporate-speak, its CEO said the ElectraMeccanica acquisition means Xos is “gross-margin positive and has now charted our course to being free cash-flow positive.” In other words, maybe now it’ll start making some money. And oddly, ElectraMeccanica’s website is still up and, until you start clicking its broken links, looks like it’s still ready to take your cash for a Solo.
In the meantime, it looks like those bought-back Solos have reached the end of their ride. According to a report by The Autopian, the TikTok video creator is a former engineer for Local Motors, another start-up that bit the dust after making headlines for making a car on a 3D printer. Just as most of the electric General Motors EV-1 models went to the crusher back in the early 2000s, it looks like these Solos will also eventually be crumpled and recycled. It seems there are still a few running around in the wild, but for the most part, this Solo was the car that ultimately couldn’t stand on its own alone.
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