The Alpha Motor Ace electric coupe design. Alpha Motor Corporation is nominally an electric vehicle startup. It has spent the last year pumping out retro-futuristic design after retro-futuristic design , one of which just won the award at this year’s LA Auto Show for best electric coupe . But for every new vehicle design Alpha Motor Corporation has released, there are more questions left unanswered. How is the startup funded? What are its plans to build these vehicles? What exactly is Alpha Motor Corporation?
Bengt Halvorson at Green Car Reports put up a mighty effort trying to track down some of those answers in August . He found some, sort of — it appears that the startup was founded, and perhaps funded, by the same person (or people behind) another EV startup called Neuron, which had ties to China but disappeared from the US startup scene as quickly as it arrived. (Alpha Motor says there’s no relationship.) But he also turned up even more questions, like: why are two auto show baristas apparently moonlighting as Alpha Motor’s spokespeople?
Those two men — Joshua Boyt and Jay Lijewski — now say they are full time Alpha Motor employees. Boyt is the head of business development, and Lijewski the head of marketing. I recently spent about 35 minutes talking to them via video call in an attempt to answer some of the questions Halvorson (and, in May, former InsideEVs reporter Gustavo Ruffo ) tried to answer. Yet another mysterious EV startup Boyt and Lijewski made a few admissions. They said the startup does not currently have any drivable prototypes and that there is no parent company above the Alpha Motor corporate entity registered in Delaware. But they remained tight-lipped about pretty much everything else — funding, the size of the team, or why Alpha Motor shares a registered address with Neuron EV.
Boyt said they’re “really not trying to do anything that confuses or misleads people,” and that they are just trying to build a “different kind of company.” Considering how many well-funded EV startups have found themselves under investigation for potentially overpromising or misleading investors, maybe that’s the safer move when there’s still billions of dollars flowing into the space.
Playing the “mysterious EV startup” can sometimes help capture some of that money. But so far, Alpha Motor is demonstrating there’s a razor-thin line between being properly cautious and intentionally muddy about what, exactly, the new company is up to.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
I, like many people, have seen a lot of the designs that Alpha has put out. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make it to the LA Auto Show, but I saw you guys won one of the awards there. There’s obviously a lot of attention on the startup in some ways. So I just want to know more about what’s going on. I know that there’s not a lot of information about the origins of this startup, how it plans to execute on any of the things that we’ve seen. So I’m just looking for more answers on all that.
Joshua Boyt: Sure. Well, I mean, obviously, a lot of what we’re doing is intentional. I mean, we definitely put a lot of thought and care into everything that we do, as kind of expressed in the designs that have been put out. Our real goal, again, is just creating cars we think people will love. And we want to create a different kind of company. I mean, there’s a lot of people in this space kind of moving within historically… traditional methods, especially in terms of automotive, and we really just want to be a different kind of company. And so, for that reason, we’ve been a lot more strategic on what kind of information we share, how we release our vehicles and when. But again, it’s all meant for a specific purpose, to make sure that we are in control of what it is that we… the narrative is, and what it is we do as we develop a company. “we really just want to be a different kind of company” Jay Lijewski: Yeah, and there’s a couple of different ways to go about building a company. Especially at this stage of the timeline. We could have chosen to remain extremely stealth and not put any vehicles out until we were ready to go. Vehicle designs, that is. But we decided to put as much information, vehicle designs, design ethos out there […]
source Alpha Motor’s EV designs look cool, but will they ever get made?
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