quote:
Shuttling between Oslo and California, Willums has raised $78 million from Silicon Valley and European investors captivated by the genial, soft-spoken Norwegian's vision of a carbon-neutral urban car. You might spot him at Buck's, the VC hangout in Woodside, or at a tech conference in Napa. Four months after Willums's investment group acquired Think last year, he was hammering out its strategy at a brainstorming session hosted by Google.Willums's pitch is this: He's not just selling an electric car; he's upending a century-old automotive paradigm, aiming to change the way cars are made, sold, owned, and driven.
Taking a cue from Dell (Charts, Fortune 500), the company will sell cars online, built to order. It will forgo showrooms and seed the market through car-sharing services like Zipcar. Every car will be Internet-and Wi-Fi-enabled, becoming, according to Willums, a rolling computer that can communicate wirelessly with its driver, other Think owners, and the power grid.
In other words, it's Web 2.0 on wheels. "We want to sell mobility," Willums says. "We don't want to sell a thing called the Think."
That's a lot to ride on one tiny car. And it's a big gamble for consumers, particularly freeway-driving, SUV-loving Americans. But global warming, the boom in green energy, and the changing economics of electric car production -- doing for $100 million what Detroit does for $1 billion -- have unleashed forces that won't be as easy to crush as the EV1 electric car scrapped by General Motors (Charts, Fortune 500) in 2003.
Email this thread to someone!
posted 30 July 2007 03:56 PM
