The world of electric cars is about to get a whole lot more exciting.
Putting an end to climate change is of course a noble cause to get behind, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be a lucrative one. The demand for electric cars is most certainly on the rise, and it doesn’t take very much business acumen to know there is an opportunity there.
What does require business acumen however is the ability to secure €31 million funding for your company. To do so requires reaching a standard that most of us can only dream about, and a product that stands out clearly above the rest.
Enter Norman Crowley, CEO of Wicklow-based Crowley Carbon. Cool Planet Group is the business to secure this monumental funding, and it’ll be through its Electrifi division that a car worth €3 million is to be produced.
Speaking on the latest episode of All In, backed by AIB, Norman said that several of these electric motors are in the pipeline:
“There’ll be a couple of those in the 2020 year.
“We do two things. We take very old cars and we convert them to what we call hyper-classics; so very fast classic cars, and they’re extremely desirable.”
Naturally, this high a price tag garners the attention of people with the means to spend money on such an exclusive car. No small number of household names adorn his list of customers, and some are so high profile he couldn’t even say who they were:
“There’s quite a lot of celebrities have ordered the cars like Dev Patel has ordered a car.
“Ellie Goulding’s wedding car we built for her wedding, and there’s some other stars that we’re not allowed talk about who are incredibly large global names.”
“If you’re in the Irish market… you have to build exclusive cars”
It’s the exclusivity of these cars that makes them so desirable. The availability of makes such as Hyundai and Toyota has saturated the market somewhat for standard electric cars, so Norman’s desire to do something different is what drove (pardon the pun) the price up:
“We get criticised a bit for why don’t we build a €20,000 electric car, but the Irish cost base is not built around building cars like Hyundai.
“So you have to build, if you’re in the Irish market doing cars, you have to build exclusive cars that cost quite a lot of money and so that’s what we build.”
There is little doubt that electric cars are the way forward for putting an end to climate change. With entrepreneurs like Norman Crowley leading the way, who says you can’t do it in style?
