Yahoo Finance 8 years. $28 million in deposits. The perplexing tale of a three-wheeled car that never arrived.
PHOENIX – He promised to revolutionize transportation, drawing comparisons to Henry Ford and persuading roughly 65,000 people and an eccentric millionaire to invest in his vision of a futuristic, ultra-cheap, gas-powered car that would generate thousands of jobs.
After his pledge in 2013 to build an 84 mpg, three-wheeled vehicle with two tandem seats priced at less than $7,000, Phoenix engineer-entrepreneur Paul Elio enjoyed a whirlwind of publicity. He secured about $28 million in deposits from potential customers and landed investments throughout the country from believers in his vision.
Elio appeared on CNN, scored stories in The New York Times, USA TODAY and The Wall Street Journal, and won praise from rising Republican star Gov. Bobby Jindal for his promised investments at a former General Motors plant in Louisiana.
But nearly a decade after his company, Elio Motors, unveiled a prototype vehicle, not a single car has been produced, leaving tens of thousands of depositors alternately wondering, waiting or fuming.
The company – now based in a spartan office leased month-to-month and next to a pawnshop in central Phoenix – had only three employees at the end of 2020, according to a public filing.
And despite Elio Motors never hiring more than a handful of workers, Securities and Exchange Commission records show the company had lost nearly $216 million as of Dec. 31, 2020, about eight years after it began accepting reservations.
The company has little to show for all that money spent, save for 65,453 car reservations – most of them nonrefundable – as well as an aging prototype and an empty factory.
Press releases and SEC records show that while Elio the company was taking in money, Paul Elio the man managed on multiple occasions to clear up personal debts, including credit card liabilities and taxes he owed the IRS, according to records USA TODAY obtained from Maricopa County Superior Court in Phoenix.
When USA TODAY this summer began investigating how he pursued and spent money, all the while making repeated promises that the car was right around the corner, it appeared that the company had gone silent.
Until it filed annual reports for 2018, 2019 and 2020 on Sept. 8 with the SEC, Elio Motors hadn’t made any filings with securities regulators in nearly three years despite remaining publicly traded in the over-the-counter market, where smaller companies that don't meet the requirements of larger stock exchanges are bought and sold.
And it's in that market that the stock has plummeted from a high of $75 in 2016, according to SEC filings, to less than a dollar on Tuesday.
After USA TODAY began looking into the company, Elio Motors surfaced in early September by making an announcement: It planned to go electric by transforming the gasoline-powered Elio car into a battery-powered vehicle priced at about $15,000.
The news gave the company's shares a brief boost. Its stock price more than doubled in a day to just over $1.
Yet despite the newfound interest from some investors with a high tolerance for risk, the company – according to its financial reports filed with the SEC – remains far short of the capital it needs to start production at a former GM factory outside Shreveport, Louisiana.
Louisiana officials say they feel betrayed by Elio, who once promised them 1,500 manufacturing jobs while generating another 1,500 positions at suppliers throughout the world.
Paul Elio, 57, maintains that his vehicle still can become a reality, that he has not wasted or misused money from depositors and investors, and that the company can still be successful.
“If this doesn't work, I’ll lose more than anybody,” Elio told USA TODAY in his first major media interview since the company went silent in 2018. “This is not some pyramid scheme. This is not a Bernie Madoff. I put more money in than I’ve taken out.”
The company’s most recent public filings, submitted to the SEC after USA TODAY began reporting this story, suggest its future is shaky.
Elio Motors lost $18 million in 2020, records show.
The company, like many struggling businesses amid the COVID-19 pandemic, received a forgivable loan from the federal Paycheck Protection Program worth $110,820. That program was designed to financially assist thousands of businesses in the early stages of the pandemic.
As of Dec. 31, 2020, the company had $130,915 in cash, and it warned there was “substantial doubt” about its ability to survive.
Records also show it paid Paul Elio a $250,000 salary for each of the past two years.
His defenders say Elio has been pure of heart from the beginning, striving to deliver what he promised even as his business faltered time and time again.
“I can just tell you Paul has been very genuine and very ethical on everything he's done,” Gino Raffin, Elio’s former manufacturing chief, said in a brief interview in early September. “It's obviously all about funding.”
Help us investigate Elio Motors
Did you place a deposit on an Elio vehicle or invest in the company? We want to hear from you.
‘This is not a scam’
Bev Hargraves isn’t so sure.
From his home in Little Rock, Arkansas, the insurance salesman and avid amateur golfer placed a $1,000 reservation for the Elio car in July 2013, making him one of the company’s first depositors. He had hoped to use the car as a fuel-efficient ride to play in tournaments throughout the country.
He's still waiting.
“Every now and then I would get an email asking to invest in their stock,” said Hargraves, 70. “I’m smart enough to not do that, thank God.”
In June 2019, he emailed the company to check on the status of his reservation.
“Since it has been numerous years since I placed my order for the new auto, and production is still not occurring, I need to cancel my order and have my down-payment refunded to me at my most recent address,” he wrote. “It appears that I will be too old to enjoy this car by the time production gets it to me.”
Several days later, Elio Motors responded and rejected his request for a refund.
“I get a response back, says: ‘Thanks for your email and refund inquiry. Upon a review of your account, we see that you have an ‘all-in’ reservation, which is nonrefundable,’” Hargraves said, summarizing an email exchange provided to USA TODAY, which validated it. “First time I've heard that.”
He said he can't help but “wonder if it was a scam to start with” rather than just a company struggling to reach production.
Archived versions of Elio’s reservation page reviewed by USA TODAY via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine showed that the nonrefundable nature of “all-in” deposits was included in the 1,471-word “terms and conditions” that customers did not have to read or scroll through to accept in 2013.
But Elio argued in the interview with USA TODAY that the company was “upfront and bold” from the beginning that nonrefundable deposits were just that.
“I think the vast majority of folks are still rooting for us. I think the vast majority of folks realize this is not a scam,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is hard. It really is hard. And we may or may not make it. Until we’ve made it, we haven’t. But the thing that pisses me off is when people call it a scam like we’re not honorable. Because there’s no evidence of that."
Some people read the conditions.
Entrepreneur James Ledingham of Casa Grande, Arizona, knew that his deposit was nonrefundable from the time he made it.
“We really didn’t have a whole bunch of money. It was a big decision,” he said.
Ledingham, now 49, and his wife placed their $1,000 deposit in 2014.
But he does not believe Elio was transparent enough about the risks depositors were taking by placing reservations with the company.
“I do feel like I was tricked, but I also feel (responsible) for it as well,” he said. “I was putting my hopes into something better.”
Now he’s left with the Elio Motors T-shirt he got for placing a deposit – a memento of what could have been.
“I have my thousand-dollar T-shirt in a drawer,” he said.
‘He’s a classic entrepreneur’
Small-time investors and depositors like Hargraves and Ledingham say they’re writing off their investment in Elio as a loss. They feel deceived and disappointed.
But big-time investors also are facing losses.
Among the people who bought in was Patrick Byrne, then-CEO of Overstock.com, who put at least $1 million of his own fortune into Elio Motors in 2018 after the startup developed a plan to raise money by inventing a new cryptocurrency called ElioCoin. Overstock.com itself also invested $2.5 million in Elio.
It seemed like the type of corporate endorsement that could help Elio regain momentum after years of failing to secure enough capital to launch production.
But any hopes of Byrne helping guide Elio to glory faded after Bryne’s career unraveled in summer 2019, when he resigned as CEO of Overstock.com after he admitted that he had an affair with Maria Butina, who was later convicted of conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent of the Russian state.
Byrne’s story took another bizarre turn when he helped finance a plan in 2021 to overturn Arizona’s 2020 election of Joe Biden.
Byrne, in a recent interview with USA TODAY, said he still cheers for Elio.
"He's a classic entrepreneur," Byrne said. "I think he was sincere, and he kept putting everything into it and always seemed straight up. … I don't think at all he was a con man."
Byrne said Elio Motors’ problem was it lacked funding. But Elio vehicles "would have sold like hotcakes” had Elio been able to raise more money, Byrne said.
"It's called capitalism for a reason,” he said. “You can have the greatest idea in the world, but you need capital.”
Paul Elio’s career takes a turn
But just like the production of vehicles, the ElioCoin never happened.
It was the latest setback in a roller-coaster journey for Paul Elio.
A graduate of the former General Motors Institute, now known as Kettering University, in Flint, Michigan, Elio grew up immersed in car culture.
While studying at GMI, he began working as a design engineer at Johnson Controls, a major automotive supplier. But only about a year after graduation, he acted on his entrepreneurial urges and formed his own engineering consultancy in 1996.
For more than a decade, business was promising at ESG Engineering. By his own account, ESG grew into 45 engineers plus support staff, was awarded 10 patents and performed critical functions like developing a new seat recliner for the Toyota Camry.
But when the Great Recession of 2007-2009 hit, his company – like many others in the automotive industry – collapsed.
As General Motors and Chrysler filed for bankruptcy protection, backed by the U.S. government, Paul Elio was left scrambling for a new way to make money.
USA TODAY's Nathan Bomey reported from Arlington, Virginia, and Craig Harris from Phoenix. You can follow them on Twitter @NathanBomey and @CraigHarrisUSAT. You can also subscribe to our free Daily Money newsletter here for personal finance tips and business news every Monday through Friday morning.
More in this series
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Elio Motors: The perplexing tale of a 3-wheeled car that never arrived
