Dear Beta Testers,
It has been a year of goods and bads
I want to explain what has been happening during the last months, what is our actual state and what is our future planning, our challenges and targets.
As you know we are 6 persons involved in this project and until now it has been funded with our own money and time and some help from family and friends.
This means that all team members have to work on something else in order to make money for living, as we all have families. Only myself can give full time to the project.
As you know at the beginning of this year we finished our first prototype, it is what is usually called an alfa prototype or testing mule, it was made on a big rush from all the team and some others, even one beta tester was involved on it.
And as you know, it actually works really well, but still needs lot of improvement.
It was for me a period for over 3 months with over 14 hours daily work and followed by lot of traveling. Even on one TV shooting the mö prototype had an accident while the driver was driving it full speed off-road and drove into a trench... all that pressure on me made me fall sick for several months. Lets say that my body just gave up.
This made a big halt on the project. This halt does not mean that the project is dead or we have any intention to abandon it. It just will take us a bit longer but we will get there it is our team compromise.
But not everything has been bad news this year, we were able to make a prototype, run and test it, even had time to have a small crash test with it.
We made over 400 interviews to candidates for Beta Testers and we chose you. And discussion about improvements started with them. Relation with the manufacturer has been created and plans for starting manufacturing next year.
We were invited to show our project at the first European Light Electric Vehicle Summit at Barcelona, where our engineers met the guys from Local Motors. We share passion for vehicle innovation and open source.
And we opened reservations for the mö.
So we are very happy and proud of this year and expecting a great 2017.
At the moment we have one big challenge ahead: We need some money in order to hire talent to keep on improving the mö, to start production, and to do some marketing, we already have found some of that money on this last period.
The manufacturer Mexacover is willing to invest on next prototype, testing, manufacturing engineering and some on production start. And some other investors have contacted us interested on our project. That is great, so we are only missing some money for the design engineering and that is what I am focusing in right now.
As well during this last months as suggested by all of you, suspensions, body modifications and other improvements have been predesigned. Thank you for your help.
Next milestones will be to start producing a second prototype with all this improvements and testing them latter on, this will happen on the following months. Same time we have to find money and some other market targets in order to improve sales in the future.
Gonzalo P. Chomon
We wish you a nice and prosperous new year.
Let me remind you that you can interact with us through the Beta Testers discussion group at Facebook here:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1491592701135052/ (if you have no access please request)
If you are interested on becoming a evovelo’s distributor or supplier please contact us, as we already have a Letter of Intentions ready to be signed.