Car blogs

Tesla Motors Already Rejected Idea of Using Sprawling Factory Because of its Size

By John O'Dell, Danny King and Scott Doggett


A California EV powertrain developer with a design but no cars, eight employees and big dreams has garnered a bit of publicity after announcing a "plan" to save the giant New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. plant near San Francisco and turn its 4,700 employees into electric-car builders.


We'd love to help lead the cheering, but we see an awful lot of obstacles to what seems at best a tenuous and barely developed proposal that's hanging on hope and hype rather than rooted in reality.


In its announcement, Aurica Motors said its plan calls for it to obtain an unspecified amount of money from federal economic stimulus program grants and loans to save the 48-year-old NUMMI plant - operated as a joint venture of General Motors and Toyota since 1984 - from being closed March 31.


It would use the money - which would have to total close to $1 billion - to refurbish and retool the plant to make Aurica EVs, thus saving the 4,700 jobs at the plant and, by extension, helping preserve the jobs of some of the "50,000 people [who] work for companies who supply the massive plant with parts and services."



Aurica has designed an electric-drive system that uses independently controlled electric motors in each of a car's four wheels, all tied together through a central computer.




All well and good, but consider:
Aurica Motors' general manager, Matt Pitagora, told us today that the company has no intent to actually buy or run NUMMI - it hopes that NUMMI's present management and employees will do some sort of employee buyout, then partner with Aurica to use the money Aurica hopes (there's that word again) to get from the feds to finance the retooling needed to turn it into an EV factory.
The company announced its "plan" this week, he said, largely in hope it would generate interest from local politicians and potential investors.


Aurica hopes to get production up to 50,000 cars a year by 2015, but one analyst we talked to says a plant that size would need to be churning out 150,000 vehicles annually to cover operating costs and post a profit.


Aurica is basing its hope for federal funding on the fact that two more-established companies, Tesla Motors and Fisker Automotive, last year received almost $1 billion between them from federal stimulus funds to refurbish existing factories for production of the Tesla Model S electric sedan and the Fisker "Project Nina" extended-range plug-in electric cars.
Aurica is a start-up, with uncertain funding, no track record and no working car. Pitagora says the company is a spin-off of Aurica Labs, a four-year-old R&D company owned and operated, and funded almost singlehandedly, by Greg Bender, a research physicist with a big interest in electronics and sustainable transportation.


None of the eight staff members at Aurica Motors have automotive industry experience; their backgrounds, Pitagoras said, are in electronics.
The company doesn't want to build a car - it has designed an electric powertrain, the Aurica Recurve, that it hopes to market to a partner or partners who would then build cars using the Aurica system.




The NUMMI plant is huge - 5.3 million square feet (approximately 380 acres), and the costs of keeping it running are massive. Not even Toyota - still a powerhouse despite its current problems with safety recalls and reputation - could justify keeping it up and running after GM pulled out of the partnership during its bankruptcy reorganization late last year.
Continue reading...

Tags: Plug-ins and Electric, Aurica Motors, EVs, New United Motors Manufacturing Inc., Plan To Save NUMMI

---

Would-Be EV Maker's 'Plan' to Save NUMMI Auto Plant a Long Shot at Best was originally published by Green Car Advisor. Read the full story by clicking here.