Norway’s Think to Sell Electric Cars in U.S.

Wonder if these plans have been altered¹

DETROIT – Norway’s Think Global AS, with backing from U.S. venture capital investors, plans to produce and sell a small all-electric car in the U.S. that could go as far as 110 miles when fully charged – fresh evidence that the race to woo American consumers with electric cars is heating up and drawing interest from the same investors that helped build Silicon Valley.

Norway’s Think Global plans to launch an electric car, called the Think City, in the U.S. in 2009.
The Oslo-based electric carmaker, which recently set up a U.S. office in Menlo Park, Calif., is trying to determine what geographical areas to focus its sales activities on, with an aim to launch the car – the Think City – in 2009. Think, a Ford Motor Co. unit until the U.S. auto maker sold it to a Norwegian company in 2003, is also searching for a site in the U.S. and Mexico to assemble the car.

Jan-Olaf Willums, Think Global chief executive officer, said Think plans to sell the City, to be priced less than $25,000, in densely populated cities because of the car’s limited range. The car is just hitting the market in Norway, Sweden and Denmark where a typical user drives the vehicle for a relatively short commuting distance and plugs it into an electric outlet in his garage to charge it overnight.

[From Norway’s Think to Produce, Sell Small Electric Cars in U.S. – WSJ.com]

Something to look out for in any case

Footnotes:

1. since the original article was posted June, 2008 [↩]