Why these strange EVs from a promising start-up are now rusting away in a big pile in the Arizona desert
Published on Mar 23, 2026 at 1:19 PM (UTC+4)
by Alessandro Renesis
Last updated on Mar 23, 2026 at 1:19 PM (UTC+4)
Edited by
Amelia Jean Hershman-Jones
This scrapyard just outside of Phoenix, Arizona, US, is teeming with strange three-wheeled EVs that were abandoned here years ago by a once-promising brand you’ve likely never heard of.
The EVs are stacked one on top of the other, which is already telling.
But the story gets worse – and sadder – once you learn why they’re here.
And, for once, it’s not about bad timing.
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EVs are older than we think
Electric cars have been around for much longer than you might realize.
Depending on how you define them, the first EV dates back to the 1800s.
Even if we only consider the first vehicle you could reasonably call a ‘car,’ we have to go back to 1881, when French electrical engineer and inventor Gustave Trouvé unveiled a fully functional electric tricycle.
The Benz Patent-Motorwagen – often called the ‘birth of the automobile’ – was only unveiled a few years later, in 1886.
But electric vehicles never really took off until the late 2000s with the first Roadster.
And the Roadster was successful because it was a cool car that just so happened to be electric, which leads us to the main problem with the vehicle you see here.
How these electric vehicles ended up in a scrapyard in Phoenix, Arizona
The strange-looking thing you see here is called the Solo, a small, three-wheeled commuter launched by an electric start-up called ElectraMeccanica.
The idea was to create agile three-wheeled EVs for short trips, but things went south fast – now, those cars are rusting away in a scrapyard.
Nine times out of 10, these startups fail for a combination of bad timing and bad strategy.
Startups often fail to answer the question, ‘Who are we building this for?’ – but in this case, it was a technical catastrophe that ruined everything.
Maybe there would’ve been a market for a weird-looking three-wheeled vehicle with one seat in Arizona, but the truth is this project went wrong because it wasn’t technically sound.
After selling around 400 of these three-wheeled EVs in about three years, 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.
ElectraMeccanica simply couldn’t work out how to fix that defect, and so the cars ended up being abandoned in this scrapyard just outside of Phoenix, Arizona.
Pity.
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After beginning his automotive writing career at DriveTribe, Alessandro has been with Supercar Blondie since the launch of the website in 2022. In fact, he penned the very first article published on supercarblondie.com. He’s covered subjects from cars to aircraft, watches, and luxury yachts - and even crypto. He can largely be found heading up the site’s new-supercar and SBX coverage and being the first to bring our readers the news that they’re hungry for.
