Swedish EV start-up Uniti will market its three-seater electric car by using a new rental method instead of relying on dealership sales or selling to car-sharing companies.
The company plans to launch the Uniti One urban minicar in the UK and Sweden in the middle of next year, with Germany following later in the year.
Uniti CEO Lewis Horne said traditional sales to customers will not form the bulk of its income.
"Direct sales are still viable but it’s recurring revenues that is the business model," Horne told Automotive News Europe in an interview.
Uniti plans to link up with large companies to offer employees a mobility service.
Horne declined to say how this would work in practice. He said the company will announce more details in January.
Uniti decided to go this route because of lessons learned from the failure of the Paris’s Autolib, which was based around the Bollore Bluecar EV.
Autolib was halted in 2018 amid mounting losses associated with the high costs of maintaining its cars at multiple charging stations throughout Paris.
Different battery sizes
The Uniti One was engineered in the UK and will offer two different battery sizes to give a maximum range of 300 km (186 miles) with the biggest, a 24 kilowatt-hour pack.
It starts at 18,600 pounds (21,600 euros) before incentives in the UK for customers who want to own the car.
The vehicle is registered as a car rather than a quadricycle and so conforms to tougher safety regulations for cars including having an airbag.
It has the option of camera-based collision avoidance safety technology from suppler Mobileye that also includes lane departure warning.
Other equipment include a panoramic roof that darkens to act as a sun visor and also reduces heat build up when the vehicle is parked.
The Unity One comes with a touchscreen powered by Android Automotive OS that includes Google Maps, Waze and Spotify. The company says updates to the screen can be delivered over the air.
Uniti started as a project at Sweden’s Lund University and the company is partly financed by crowd-funding.
Horne declined to discuss the company’s larger backers.
The Uniti One will be built by the same unnamed British firm that engineered the car, which is based in Norfolk, eastern England. Horne would not say whether the company was Lotus Engineering, which is also based in Norfolk.
The car is small at just 3,222mm long and 1,709mm long.
Although it is an urban vehicle, it can travel on faster roads thanks to a top speed of 120 kph (75 mph). The 67-hp electric motor can propel the car f rom 0 to 100 kph (62 mph) in 9.9 seconds, the company said.
The three-seat layout puts the driver in the center of the vehicle, with two passengers behind. One use envisaged by the company is taking children to school.
