City Bike magazine finally got to visit the Lit Motors HQ where they interviewed Lit's Chief Marketing Manager, Ryan James. They saw and photographed their $100K C1 "prop", which was made by the same Hollywood company that makes props for movies like
Tron and
Oblivion and is designed to "create a showroom experience". Lit claims that the C1 will weigh 800 pounds, have a top speed of 100 mph and will travel 200 miles on a charge from its 8 kWh battery pack. The price of the C1 will be $24,000 and deliveries are expected to commence in late 2014.
Lit expects to manufacture and sell 1000 C1's a year. They say that they don't plan to make any money on the vehicle during the initial years of production. They have leased a building for their proposed factory somewhere in San Francisco and have selected a Li-ion battery supplier, but there is currently no battery delivery date. They don't know if the monocoque body will be made of steel or some other material, like hand-formed fiberglass.
City Bike notes that 12 months isn't lot of time to set up a factory, order tooling, train workers, work out the supply chain and a thousand other details". The magazine says that they wouldn't invest in the company, but if they produce a working production prototype they are willing to give it a try. To date, Lit has filed for 14 patents and has been granted 3.
