EVEN Electric, a Toronto, Canada-based startup, is aiming to drive the worldwide market for electric vehicle sales by launching an innovative web-based sales platform dedicated solely to electric and hybrid-electric vehicles
EVEN Electric will not be exclusively aligned with one particular auto maker. Instead, the retailer plans to sell both used and new electrified vehicles from competing brands, delivering them right to the driveways of consumers around the world and often to places where electric cars are not yet sold.
EVEN will maintain electric vehicle inventories at efficient and cost-effective centralized processing centers in key countries. Once selected, a vehicle will be shipped to the nearest ‘Customer Centre,’ a streamlined and less capital intensive version of a dealership. Vehicle deliveries – as well as service – can occur at either the Customer Centre, or directly in an owner’s driveway.
“The traditional dealership model has proven unable to deliver the sales and service experience that EV owners want and need,” said Mike Elwood, CEO of the new Canada-based venture. “Our EVEN model was developed to combine the best aspects of both an on-line and in-store retail experience to make it easy for EV customers to find and acquire exactly what they want, when and where they want it.”
“Moving from dealership to dealership to shop one car at a time is simply an outdated process. EVEN has created an entirely new distribution model – one that is enabled by technology to offer customers an unprecedented level of choice and convenience,” said John Gordon, EVEN’s COO. “At the same time, EVEN will significantly lower costs across the entire supply chain by optimizing the flow of EVs directly to the global markets when and where they’re needed.”
Elwood says EVEN Electric is basing the business model on a 2013-2014 pilot project in Iceland, in which 100 electric cars were sold quickly and 200 orders went unmet. He says the orders couldn’t be filled because some manufacturers wouldn’t ship their cars to a place where they couldn’t be serviced. Elwood says they solved that problem by launching their own service model, which they intend to do with EVEN as well.
Already the company has signed licenses with an operator in Panama. Iceland continues to operate and EVEN has its sights set on breaking ground in the US, UK, Ireland, Belgium, Sweden and several parts of Canada with others coming on line.
Microsoft is providing EVEN with software to enable customers to gain information on the cars for sale, compare vehicles, scan through inventories of available vehicles, and place their vehicle purchase order. The Canadian company is also working with EVoCharge, a Los Angeles-based supplier of PEV charging infrastructure products including its EVoReel cable management solutions.
