ElectraMeccanica once promised to bring EVs to the masses with the small Solo EV. Now, piles of that dream have been thrown away, forgotten in an Arizona scrapyard.
First spotted by the Autopian, the pile of EVs was filmed by a scrap yard hunter, desert survival aficionado and Local Motors engineer who goes by StartupSlick on the TikTok as he wandered the Pull-n-Save scrapyard in Gilbert, Arizona. So what could make an EV startup just throw away a bunch of cars like that? It all started a couple of years ago.
ElectraMeccanica had big dreams for the Solo. A single seat vehicle that technically wasn’t classified as a car, ElectraMeccanica sold the Solo for $18,000. That got you a single seat EV that was just 10 feet long, four feet wide and four feet tall powered by a single electric motor putting out 82 horsepower. With a 17.4 kWh lithium-ion battery, it got 100 miles of range and took three to six hours to charge.
In 2022, an owner complained to both the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and ElectraMeccanica that their Solo had lost power while driving. Eventually more owners came forward claiming the same issue. ElectraMeccanica’s engineering team found a defect in the Solo’s “motor controller and inverter or the battery controller” that led to the loss of power. However the company couldn’t find a fix for the issue. Ultimately, a recall in February 2023 led to nearly every single Solo ever sold being called back — just over 400 vehicles. A month later, ElectraMeccanica informed customers it would be buying back the vehicles from them.
ElectraMeccanica was eventually purchased by another EV startup called Xos, who apparently manufacture electric commercial trucks. The entire situation has led to what you see above, the Solos piled up, awaiting the crusher. According to the Drive, an employee of the scrapyard told a visitor that the destruction of the Solo’s is going to be supervised. As to why the company never found a fix and decided to just destroy the cars, the Drive reached out to Xos to get an answer and didn’t get much back.
The Drive contacted Xos seeking an official answer as to why all those EVs were sent to be crushed, rather than fixed. All Xos could share was that “Following the recall, buyback, and ElectraMeccanica’s cessation of sales, the vehicles were disposed of partly via the facility in [the] linked video. Following the acquisition by Xos, ElectraMeccanica few remaining operations have been wound down.”