By Gregory J. Wilcox, Los Angeles Daily News POSTED: 09/13/14, 9:25 PM PDT | 0 COMMENTS The management of Boulder Electric Vehicle has quietly pulled the plug on the company and closed its production facilities in Chatsworth and Lafayette, Colo. The ambitious start-up was trying to carve out a niche in the growing electric vehicle market for medium- and light-duty trucks that could replace gasoline and diesel guzzlers in corporate and municipal fleets. The company’s Web site is still up, but the phone numbers for both manufacturing facilities have been turned off. About 50 people worked at the Chatsworth plant, which opened in the spring of 2012, and 40 in Lafayette, said Boulder CEO Carter Brown. “We have essentially mothballed the company. We are not filing bankruptcy,” Brown said in an interview. “We are servicing our vehicles. We made a bunch of vehicles ... and they are in use in many fleets in Los Angeles, Texas, New York and Chicago.” Brown declined to disclose the number of units that the company turned out. The company delivered its first truck with a $70,000 price tag in January, 2012 after starting up about 18 months earlier, according to a report in the Daily Camera newspaper in Boulder. The company fell victim to a numbers game. The company’s products simply didnt resonate with the target market, at least not at this time. “No one was biting off significant orders that would support full scale manufacturing,” Brown said. That is not really surprising, said John O’Dell, electrical vehicle market specialist at the automotive Web site Edmunds. “They have a tremendous amount of potential,” he said of electric trucks. “Although you can demonstrate to a fleet manager he can save money on fuel you charge him $10,000 to $20,000 more for the electric vehicle. There is a big capital outlay at the beginning and you have to convince them to do that. It’s a hard sell.” The wind down began several months ago but the vacant space did not sit on the market for very long. The former Boulder building in the 9600 block of Irondale Avenue is now occupied by a cellphone wholesale company and the Lafayette space is being taken by a mannequin manufacturer. Kenn Phillips, Senior Vice President of the Valley Economic Alliance, laments the loss of the manufacturing jobs and the conversion of the space to another use. “As soon as you lose a manufacturer you not only have a difficult time attracting another, it’s very possible we could also lose the industrial space. And you see that happening over and over,” he said. Boulder made two models, both with a range of 80 miles to 100 miles on a single charge and capable of freeway speeds up to 75 miles-per hour, according to the company’s Web site. The 500 Series truck featured a payload capacity of 4,000 pounds and the larger 1000 Series had a 6,500 payload capacity. All of the manufacturing equipment has been put in storage — Brown would not say where — so the assembly lines could be reassembled if a market for the trucks eventually develops. The timing for a comeback is hazy at best. “It depends on the customer base. If fuel goes through the roof to $10 bucks a gallon it would be this year. If it’s very gradual it could be five to 10 years or sometime in our lifetime,” Brown said. “It feels like the solar industry that started in the ’70s and then really didn’t get going until about 10 years ago.”
Posted on: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 19:33:59 +0000
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