Move over Tesla, the man who made the Bricklin is back — with an EV

financialpost.com:

Malcolm Bricklin hates lying in bed. He’s 85, and he can feel the life “draining right out of him” when he’s stretched out on a mattress. Instead, he gets up with the birds, gets dressed and gets out of the door ASAP, then climbs into a cherry-red, three-wheeled electric vehicle with his name on the back that is parked in his driveway.

Most mornings, his destination will be a breakfast joint in West Melbourne, Fla. He arrives at roughly 6 a.m., about an hour before the place officially opens. But the staff know him as a regular, and will usher him in and prepare his meal of choice: two poached eggs, onions, tomato, a slice of Swiss cheese and two pieces of whole wheat toast (no butter), plus ketchup, which he smears on the toast before arranging the foods into a sandwich and washing it all down with a coffee.

Sure enough, by the time he has finished breakfast, the diner’s parking lot will be filling up, and a similar scene will repeat itself there “every day,” according to Bricklin. Someone will ask him about the three-wheeled, cherry-red EV with his name on the back, and the car’s owner, and founder and chief executive of Visionary Vehicles Inc., will launch into a pitch about the sleek-looking ride, eventually asking the audience how much they think the car costs.

“The average answer is US$115,000, and then when I tell people the price is US$39,000, they ask me where they can put down a deposit,” he said. “People love this car, but it is just a prototype, and I drive it every day to find out all the things I don’t like about it, so we can fix all those things before we build it for sale, and that is one lesson I learned in New Brunswick.”

Both Bricklin and New Brunswick learned a few lessons 50-odd years ago, when the