Who is Rich Marks? How can he say what he says?

To reach me by email use my website on the link below to send an email; it is easy to access on the front page. Sorry but spam robots are vicious with published email addresses!

Richard W. Marks
President
EnVironmental Transportation Solutions, LLC
Detroit, MI
www.EcoVElectric.com


Biographical background on the author:

The author has always been interested in mechanical and electrical things. From early ages he took things apart and put them back together. He took that interest to college and graduated from University of Maryland with a BSME (Mechanical Engineering). He then went on to Cornell University and graduated with a MSME. He was recruited by General Motors Research Labs and went to work with GM in Warren, MI. He decided early on he wanted to get the experiences necessary to become a Car Division Chief Engineer. While that never happened, he did get a variety of great experiences in areas of vehicle structure, safety, durability, ride pleasibility, weight control, international structures program coordination, aero dynamics, chassis systems, and electric vehicles. He considers his expertise to be total vehicle systems with the understanding of how to conduct a production vehicle program start to finish.

He spent 25 years with GM, but his last 5 years were involved with the EV1 electric vehicle program and with EV conversion programs. He worked on the vehicle systems and assembly side and was involved with all the engineers and management team on the entire vehicle. He then initiated an activity to develop EV conversions that GM and its manufacturing partners could build in their own plants. While the EV1 was exceptional, it was also very expensive to develop and build. Conversions offered GM an opportunity to market and sell a much lower price EV to the commercial and consumer markets. He and his team built the first Chevy S10 conversion for GM and GM took that to production, but not with the author involved or in the way he had originally intended. The S10 GM built was costly and did not do very well in the market for many reasons.

After the S10, he pursued a relationship with Toyota to build a Geo Prizm conversion in the Fremont, CA plant. That project got relatively far along, until GM and Toyota could not resolve financial issues. Then his team converted a Geo Tracker 4 door to electric drive for a management demonstration and it was accepted as a worthwhile project to continue. The team pursued a relationship with Suzuki to convert the Tracker in the CAMI plant in Canada. Suzuki got very involved in the project and wanted to do this. Between the Toyota and Suzuki projects, the author made many trips to Japan and Europe and met with many of the suppliers making EV parts. Tracker was coming in initially too expensive and the team was told to reduce the cost by 30% if it was ever to reach production. Six months later the team had reduced costs more than 30% but GM decided they had changed their minds. The author then went off and pursued a couple other conversions.

One was going to be a low cost Postal Truck conversion (never built), well before the USPS issued their RFP for one in the 1998 time-frame. The other was to convert a small car, the “Chevy,” being built for the Mexican market (Actually it was a German Opel small car produced in Mexico). This project was coordinated and guided with two outside suppliers who had a great deal of electric vehicle experience. Two cars were converted. The one selected was outstanding and demonstrated how simple and low-cost a small car conversion could be. The car did not have air conditioning, but did have everything else. It went 65 mph and about 50-60 miles on a charge. It could be assembled in Mexico on the assembly line and brought to the US and certified. But again GM got cold feet and it was at that point that the author decided that his commitment to EV’s was far greater than GM’s. He left GM and walked out the door after nearly 25 years.

The over the next 6 years, the author took on two jobs with a couple of Tier 1 suppliers to the major US OEM’s. He got great experiences to complement his GM experiences. He learned how to quote projects, work with Tier 2 & 3 suppliers, did supplier development, learned quality systems, did Process Sign-Offs and Production Part Approval Processes, worked with manufacturing sites and even set up a low volume assembly line to build a specialty automotive truck. All of this was done as he continued to be in charge of the Engineering & Design Teams, and responsible for Project Management and Profit/Loss. Both jobs ended when both companies re-organized under new management from outside of the US.

At that point the author came back to his passion for electric vehicles and started a consulting company on EV’s, EnVironmental Transportation Solutions, LLC. He consulted for two companies trying to develop neighborhood and highway electric vehicles. Both companies failed to find investors and pay him for his work so finally he left to do his own road-worthy electric Low Speed Vehicle. He brought his work back to Michigan which included several prototypes he, with the help of others, had built (at his expense.) The EcoVElectric is the product his company is working on to get funded. The author is now writing a book to guide people doing EV conversions (converting gas cars to electric drive). His purpose is to bring his understanding of vehicle safety, both at the vehicle level and high voltage safey level and plug-n-play reliability to the surface that others can learn from his OEM knowledge. He wants converters to better understand the consequences they face with each decision they make as they modify their cars to electric drive. The book should help the EV cause in many different ways by making conversions less science fair projects, more safe and more enjoyable.
If you have questions, or need advise; I am an email away. Look for my book "The Converter's Guide to the Galaxy and EV Conversions," coming soon to eBay(?).

Lastly, in 2007 he joined the Electric Automobile Association (www.EAAEV.org) and got involved in creating a new Michigan Chapter. His goal was to help the EV converters of the EAA to understand better how to improve their conversions in many different regards. His focus has been on safety and reliability. This Guide is a result of that desire.
Join EAA; it is a great organization and they will help you with your conversion, too.

What is going on with people investing in Electric Car companies?

We, www.EcoVElectric.com , are an electric car company and have not found any interest on the part of private investors, yet others are getting significant money. What is going on?

Who seems to be getting investment money and from where? Silicon Valley has put a $150M into Tesla and Tesla is struggling to build vehicles and are over a year late. So what?
Aptera just got $24M round C funding and Google.org’s RechargeIT program was a small part of this.

Think is working with $76M of funding out of Silicon Valley, too.

Phoenix is still in trouble and still trying to climb out of a hole.

Miles still has a long way to go and they really don’t know where they are either. There is a reason China is slow coming to the US. Miles may not even understand this. Again cars are not in their business experience.

Zenn is struggling and you can go to their financials and see they are selling less than 400 vehicles per quarter. Don’t know what the future holds for them.

And there are others. It does not take a rocket scientist to see the EV opportunity out there and it is growing. It is like 1990’s all over again. EV companies popping up all over, but few survived. Most again were very short on automotive fundamentals.

Do these companies have what it takes to be successful? Success is different for different people. Why are VC’s investing in these companies? It is not for a long term investment; it is all about pumping up the “value” of the company and then introducing “production” vehicles to the market and selling out after the IPO. Then will the companies survive? I believe they will not. Not without the key automotive based disciplines a world class company needs. These companies will be sold based on emotionalism, enthusiasm, and lots of hope and frustration about the World today. The VC’s will be all smiles as they reap great sums of money from an unknowing and unsuspecting public. Most of these companies are very weak on automotive understanding including design, engineering, test and validation. Most can’t wait to learn or do the proper testing. Most will probably end up in severe financial trouble within a couple of years of selling these untested battery systems they are going to use. They will potentially slowly die and disappear. People will be bitter and complain of a conspiracy against EV’s but it is so much more than that.

I worked on the GM EV1 and saw the problems a very large and wealthy corporation can get themselves into. No start up can spend $1,000,000,000 to build 1000 vehicles and then call them all back and crush them. Why did this happen? In addition to all the usual suspects presented in “Who Killed the Electric Car,” GM had other major issues they could not overcome. They pissed off their supply base by having many of the suppliers amortize GM’s tooling costs over unrealistic volumes and then GM shut the program down after building about a 1000 cars. GM never guarantees anything in their contracts. As we used to say in the Tier 1 supplier business, which I joined after GM, “the only thing worse than doing business with GM is not doing business with GM.” So what was the problem? GM did not do enough testing on EV1 and they sort of knew that. (Their lead acid batteries were no good and the Ovonic’s NiMH batteries were $40,000 a pack and those batteries were not very good either! Toyota with Panasonic had them both right. How did GM fix the S10 EV’s? They put in Panasonic lead acid batteries. How did Ford fix the Ranger EV’s, they took out the 8V GM lead acid EV batteries and put in Panasonic NiMH. Toyota and Panasonic did the proper testing and took the proper time to do it.) But then GM eliminated their supplier base, many of who would never build GM another EV1 production or service part ever again. GM had no option but to recall and crush the EV1’s. Bottomline, GM could afford to do this with their huge budgets. No small company will know all of this and know how to solve it, without extensive automotive experience. People from the software industry will take years and years to learn what they need. People from the sales and marketing side, don’t even know what they don’t know about automotive. It will probably kill them and their companies. Do the early VC investors care? No they don’t as long as they can get their money out before the deck of cards falls.

So what is EcoV’s problem? We don’t have the above issues because we are strongly trained and experience in automotive. We have done high and low volume production. We have done testing and validation. We have done the design, engineering and development of automobiles. We have done electric vehicles at the OEM’s. We have the people with experience from the Board Room to the show room. We know how to integrate customer needs with a low cost flexible product design, integrate supplier base, and integrate all the processes to develop, market, sell and service EcoV. These are all things a vehicle company must have.

But we are not sexy. We are not known by past accomplishments. We don’t have powerful investors on our side promoting us to their wealthy friends where everyone is after a quick buck. We are a company on a mission to provide a needed product that we know both fleets and the public wants and needs. We are trying to set up a sustainable business with a focus on still being around serving our customers in 50 years. With a 50 year survival plan you do things differently today than if you do if you have a 3 year plan to get in, pump it up, and get out. We are in it for the long haul not a short flash in the pan. So if these are things you are concerned about and consider important, we need to know and talk!
Do we need and want all of the above companies to be successful? Yes we do! We hope they will be. But they need to get a lot smarter, a lot quicker.