Revving Up a Revolution
Goleta Auto Designers Win Award at ‘Future of Electric Cars’ Conference
In October 2008, Eric Sandoz and Ben Werner thought they had secured $40 million in seed capital to develop Goleta’s Revolution Motors, a company they had created to produce electric vehicles. Then the market crashed and their funder, Morgan Stanley, pulled out.
Sandoz, a PhD student at UCSB, says that maybe the loss of a huge venture capital infusion is the best thing that happened to them. “There is such a long history of start-up companies that get too much money too soon and then fail.”
Instead, Revolution Motors has had to grow in a deliberate fashion, doing more with less. Two weeks ago, they received a big boost of encouragement when their proof-of-concept car — named the Dagne after a character in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged — won the Most Imaginative Vehicle award at the IDKTechEx “Future of Electric Cars” conference in Silicon Valley. The award “was assessed on the technical development of the product, its market potential, and benefits it brings over alternatives.”
