Cheap cars that came from promising start-up have made a big pile in Arizona scrapyard

There’s a scrapyard just outside Phoenix, Arizona, US, that’s packed with strange three-wheeled EVs.

The EVs are stacked one on top of the other, and the story behind them is quite sad.

They used to belong to customers of a promising start-up, but it all went wrong.

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The cars were built by an Arizona-based start-up called ElectraMeccanica.

The idea was to create agile three-wheeled electric commuters for short trips.

Unfortunately for them, it all went really wrong quickly, and the cars are now rusting away in the scrapyard.

What happened with the Arizona start-up

The EV was called the ‘Solo’, a reference to the fact it only had one seat.

The company sold just over 400 units in about three years, but it all fell apart.

In 2022, the company received a complaint from a customer who said their Solo had lost propulsion while driving.

The same issue then began affecting nearly every vehicle they’d made, and so they had to recall them all.

The problem is that ElectraMeccanica simply couldn’t work out how to fix that defect, and so the cars ended up being scrapped.

Start-up life is hard

For every start-up that turns into a public company, like Rivian or Tesla, there are 10,000 that are either struggling or failing.

For example, we’re still trying to work out what’s going on with halo.car.

Launched just over a year ago, halo.car is a car hire start-up that offers driverless rental cars.

But it’s unclear whether they’re still in business, and the fact they haven’t been active on social media for a year (bar a short LinkedIn post from three months ago) isn’t promising.

An ever worse fate befell the unnamed Chinese start-up that bought brand-new Teslas over a decade ago.

By the time the Teslas got to China, the start-up had already gone belly up.