Detroit Electric, a previously-defunct US manufacturer that last produced a car in 1939, is to be reincarnated. The new venture, headed by former Lotus executive director Albert Lam, has announced that its first vehicle will be a
Tesla
-style electric roadster based on the
Lotus Elise
, that’ll be revealed next month before making its debut at the Shanghai Motor Show.
Tesla will be main target for new company
Detroit Electric is talking up its Michigan location, with Don Graunstadt, Detroit Electric’s CEO of North American Operations telling Michigan Live that “there’s more technology, there’s more automotive talent here in Southeast Michigan than all the other states combined.” The new company has already established headquarters in the Fisher Building, an art deco edifice and Detroit landmark that was originally financed with General Motors money. The company says that ‘a site has also been identified’ to assemble the new car, with an annual capacity of 2,500 units and production due to commence in August.
The company has already released a teaser image of its first model, showing its styling to be, perhaps unsurprisingly, heavily Lotus-influenced. Detroit Electric says that the car will have “bold styling, outstanding performance, exhilarating handling characteristics and impressive range.” All sounds pretty much par for the course, but one thing the company can’t be accused of is a lack of ambition; it hopes to follow the roadster up with two more high-performance models that are slated for production in 2014.
Detroit Electric was originally formed in 1884, as the Anderson Carriage Company, and started to produce cars as the Anderson Electric Car Company in 1907. The firm produced electric carriages and buggies using a rechargeable lead-acid battery, with an Edison nickel-iron battery becoming optional in 1911, the same year the company changed its name to The Detroit Electric Car Company. The company’s cars were, it was claimed, able to get 80 miles between charges with a top speed of 20mph, and offered the significant advantage of easy starting, lacking the hand-crank that was required with competing internal combustion vehicles. At its peak the company was selling over 1,000 cars a year, aided by the high price of petrol after the first world war, but with the end of the war and the advent of more reliable and faster internal combustion engines with greater range, Detroit Electric’s sales dropped off. The company filed for bankruptcy in 1929, but continued to struggle on until 1939, when the last Detroit Electric – to date, anyway – rolled off the production line.