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Yea or Nay: Would You "Subscribe" to a Vehicle?

Atlis Motor Vehicles is attempting to up-end how cars are sold

By Rain Noe - May 13, 2022

in Cars

For years, if you wanted to acquire a new vehicle you had two choices: Buy or lease. Some people will only ever buy, if for example their priority is to build equity with each payment. Some will only ever lease, if for example they want a new vehicle every three years or so. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but are similar in that each month you're making a car payment (unless you belong to the minority who's capable of buying outright with cash).

So in a sense, whether you buy or lease, you are "subscribing" to a vehicle. All of the rest of it—whether you "own" your car, or the financing company owns it—is really just perception.

Startup Atlis Motor Vehicles is hoping that that's how you already view it, and are thus offering subscriptions to their forthcoming electric truck. (Which in my opinion is ugly as all get-out; it looks like it was designed in Minecraft, but that's not what this post is about.) For $700 a month—as a starting price, anyway—you get the Atlis XT in your driveway, with insurance included.

The company boasts that this subscription includes the vehicle registration—big whoop, that's like what, $50 a year?—routine maintenance, and free charging at Atlis charging stations. None of these sound like powerful incentives; routine maintenance is already offered with many new car purchases/leases, and how many Atlis charging stations will there be, within comfortable range of your home?

One benefit of their proposed subscription model is their insistence that it will be negotiation-free, a boon for those of us who don't enjoy being Glengarry Glen Ross'd by an oily car salesman. A second benefit is that, unlike with a lease, you can quit your subscription at any time with no penalty. Whether these are strong enough to overcome the "subscription fatigue" many of us are feeling, remains to be seen.

What say you? Assuming the monthly charge was within your reach ($700/month is way out of my range), would you subscribe to a car or truck?

Am also curious, for those of you in new vehicles: Are you a buy or lease person, and why?

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Kyle Whalen wHALEN

2 years ago

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A rather long, but interesting comment about Atlis Motors you may find interesting, from QAD.WISTIA --------(Archived by administrator, May 01, 2022) (begin) Just a few comments from my observations of over the past 7 years when AMV began as "Volta Motors LLC, of Mesa (602) 309-5425” (Google it) . Folks, AMV is falling behind, but you can still make a lot of money quickly as shareholders. AMV was just able to cobble together a plywood-Styrofoam truck to show for the latest crowd-funding rounds. It does not drive per expectations, cannot tow anything, has no operating windows, air bags, weather seals, turn signal steering wheel stalk, windshield wipers, proper windshield safety glass, roll down windows, air conditioning-heating system, compressor-air tank installation, inverters, SAE approved mirrors or exterior lighting, tires and wheels that meet the load rating, spare tire carrier, never been tested on a dyno or with an AMV battery pack, So far AMV has never even produced a complete battery pack, they claimed futuristic, unbelievable specifications six years ago for non-existent hardware, have no charging pedestals, or have an electrical service entrance to their facility (currently 600A, 277/480V, not even 300kW) large enough to develop and test a claimed 1.5MW charging system, just to mention a few deficiencies. The XT Prototype has never been seen driving on the road at highway speeds or towing anything, its limit seems to be under 2MPH traveling a few feet on level smooth ground. AMV does not own a bi-directional chassis dynamometer which is necessary for vehicle and battery road simulation performance testing. No independent laboratory test have ever been conducted, on the vehicle, cells, battery modules or pack or chassis, nothing has never been shown at a trade or auto show. Virtually nothing on the prototype vehicle is an example of anything close to "production ready" it would never pass crash testing or SAE standards. 30 patents claimed are just "applications" costing less than $100 to file and not requiring working models. AMV specializes in promotional videos that claim to be scientific tests. AMV claims to have generated over $1.2B in contracted commitments for XT pickup trucks, this is the value of "free, no deposit reservations"; there is no cash value. AMV claims to have MOU's and LOI's, for over $400MM in battery pack interest but has never published the names of the actuall organizations. They claim to have Government contracts for their technology but have never disclosed any details or documents. Their cell design is being surpassed by the BYD Blade Cell which has superior performance, cost and safety attributes, is currently in production and available to purchase and used in numerous vehicles. BYD has positioned themselves to make billions of cells, has production factories that cover 100’s of acres of land, 250,000 employees, has world-wide patents publicly available, and is becoming the industry standard. AMV is attempting to make a cell production facility out of 2 X 4's, plastic sheeting and a shipping container, which is laughable. They seem to be on their 5th revision of their basic cell, the 4th revision of their motors and 7th revision of their 1.5MW charging connector with no real test data on any of these devices ever revealed. Over 20 key employees have left the company despite pay rates in the 6 figure area. The days of an individual or small company producing a complex vehicle seems to be over. You may see AMV's attempt to survive by farming out the body, cells, motors, drive system and other components to experts or buying off the shelf components. Over 20 highly paid key people have recently left AMV, including: Huda lmashhadany, Head of Energy; Eric Anderson, Electrical Technician; Kenneth Baca, Senior Firmware Engineer; Anirudh (Ani) Bhokarika, Mechanical Engineer - Battery Cell Division; Ching-Yen Chung, Lead Mechanical Engineer; Ross Compton, Lead Vehicle Designer - XT Program; Christopher Dawson, Vice President of Manufacturing Engineering; Jack Al Ferzly, Head of Energy and Director of Pack Development; Craig Trzebny,Director of Energy Engineer; Kishor Satish Gaikwad, Power Electronics; Bassam Raza, Senior Electrical Engineer; Keith Rose, Senior Mechanical Engineer; Michael Konstas, Chief Financial Officer, and Tamica Sears, VP of Talent, and Matthew Wilkins, Senior Design Lead, Chief Financial Officers Glenn Reese and Greg Hassler, more to research and follow. Web information was gathered from Linkedin, Glassdoor, Rocketreach, Facebook, Twitter, Signalhire, Apollo, and Zoominfo and others. If ever produced, AMV vehicles will not be cost effective, and be too expensive to be competitive. Watch for the next Crowdfunding Round, you can make money by manipulating the shares, by low, sell high. People have made thousands already. As far as actual hardware, the XT, XP, Cube Cell, and 15 minute charging are all products that live in the computerized imaginary world of CGI. These are products of the future, and always will be. If you are interested in current real EV engineering and on the road technology currently available visit the “Monro Live” (48,250,000+ channel views and the “WeberAuto (33,000,000+ channel views) ... a final thought, you may want to visit AMV' World Headquarters in Mesa to see what's going on. (end) REFF: https://qad.wistia.com/medias/w688ohft8w?hss_channel=fbp-1586124775024416

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Divinetomedy C

2 years ago

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One note: car registration can be hugely expensive. Depends on state. E.g. in WA state, a Volvo XC90 hybrid will cost $1071.25 to register this year.

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Harry Werner

2 years ago

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My only car purchase has been through cash. Vehicle is 8 years old, paid for by stashing away some cash for 8 years in savings and small interment accounts. I'm terrified of car loans.

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Dan Lewis

2 years ago

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Subscription is here - Porsche, Audi, Mercedes, Polestar, Fisker. Nothing new here. They are all-encompassing - insurance, maintenance, some include vehicle swaps.

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- Erik Lindstrom
  
  Dan Lewis
  
  2 years ago
  
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  Agreed, its already available with other vehicles, like Volvo. I don't know if it's actually a better deal for the end user, but it streamlines the process of vehicle ownership.
  
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