Two electric vehicles managed to crowdfund over $1 million in just a few days

A few weeks ago, we reported in exclusivity about Storm Sondors, the maker of the popular Sondors ebike, launching another crowdfunding campaign but this time for an electric car. We mentioned that it could very well be the first serious attempt to crowdfund an electric vehicle, but as it turns out, it was joined by another in a matter of days.

There are now two electric vehicle crowdfunding campaigns running simultaneously and they both have already reached their goal for a combined total of over $1 million toward the development of the vehicles. 

Sondors

Sondors was aiming for a ridiculously small goal of $70,000, which he reached in hours, but the ultimate goal is a $1 million investment and he is well on his way with over $330,000 at the time of writing and with 80 days left to campaign.

As mentioned when first reporting on the Sondors car, he is trying to raise $1 million for the development of the vehicle by offering 83,333 shares at $12 each. After the fundraising, the company would value itself at $33.4 million with Storm Sondors owning all the rest of the shares.

That’s a high valuation for what basically represents a few exterior design sketches and a list of specs:

• room for 3 people
• starts at $10,000
• range between 50 and 200 miles

He didn’t unveil anything new with the launch of the campaign that we didn’t reveal last month, but a lot of people are willing to invest in him apparently – because make no mistake: you are investing in Storm Sondors and his car design, that’s it. Sondors’ bike business is not included in this deal at all.

Uniti

The other vehicle is the ‘Uniti’ by a group of young engineers and developers in Sweden and from around the world. They already reached their goal of 500,000 Euro and surpassed it by raising over 660,000 Euro at the time of writing with 39 days left to their campaign.

The vehicle itself is somewhat similar to Sondors in the sense that it is a small electric city car, but the team also wants to add autonomous capabilities to the Uniti.

They already developed several components of the vehicle and it looks a lot more advanced than Sondors’ design. Additionally, it’s not just one guy but a team of people and they already raised money through more traditional channels: angel investors and government grants.

Despite all that, Uniti is coming to a post-money valuation of only a fraction of Sondors: 9,800,000 EURO.

As mentioned in our first article about the Sondors campaign, these crowdfunding campaigns are considered high-risk investments – proceed at your own risk. This is in no way an endorsement, but since it looks like the two first attempts to crowdfund the development of electric cars, we will be following the stories closely at Electrek.