It’s the end of Zenn, as we know it. The little car that could and, for a while, couldn’t (drive on Ontario roads), has announced it’s no longer in the business of building cars.
I
nstead, they’re going to focus on custom making electric drive trains for other manufacturers.
It makes sense. Zenn was basically invisible as a large-scale manufacturer – total production being in the hundreds, not hundreds of thousands.
Now they can focus where their unique skills are. Meanwhile, the landscape of alternative auto has changed in the last four years, notably with the high-profile pumping of the Chevy Volt. Remember how Toyota got mad at the province’s Volt discount for future buyers?
Remember also that the province owns 3.8 per cent of GM and the feds have 7.9 per cent. Zenn would have to go up against taxpayers and lawmakers. That’s not a conspiracy suggestion, it’s evidence that the slowest movers of change are talking and walking driving electric.
Regardless of positive change, there’s a certain sadness to the news. Zenn was a homegrown Canadian vision of the electrified transport future. It was a complete product, not the raw guts of something carrying another maker’s badge. Hopefully this will still mean success for Zenn and the EEstor product in the future and not Zenn’s last gasp for air before drowning in the late-coming adoption of an alt-fuel vision by the big, heavy, bailout supported car industry peers.
As a car company, there was also the comfort of Zenn being wholeheartedly behind its concept, simply because they weren’t tainted with a history of killing electric cars and light rail. [rssbreak]
