The young Lebanese company EV Electra has bought from the hibernating Swedish company NEVS its electric car project Emily GT, considered the heir to the spirit of Saab. Jihad Mohammad, head of EV Electra, intends to start producing Emily GT electric cars at the long-idle former Saab plant in Trollhättan, Sweden, but fans of the Swedish brand greeted this seemingly good news with skepticism.
We continue to follow the Saab legacy, which will not find either refuge or peace. Let us recall that the assets of the bankrupt automobile company Saab were bought in 2012 by NEVS (National Electric Vehicle Sweden), a company registered in Sweden, which was backed by a group of Chinese investors. NEVS was unable to either obtain the rights to use the Saab brand or competently manage its heritage: Saab’s technological developments remained unclaimed, NEVS’s own projects did not work out, and the plant in Trollhättan was never revived. This spring, as a result of the severe economic crisis, NEVS entered the so-called hibernation mode or, more simply put, was frozen.
< p>After NEVS was frozen, the Swedish advertising agency Plint Marketing, with which the car company collaborated, posted a series of videos on YouTube, shot in 2020, telling NEVS engineers and designers about the new Emily GT family of electric vehicles. With the help of these videos, NEVS hoped to draw attention to the still fresh project and sell it to interested investors. In the summer there were rumors that the Emily GT project would be bought by a certain European company, but in the end they were not confirmed, and at the end of last week the Swedish media reported on the NEVS deal with the Lebanese company EV Electra.
EV Electra first caught our attention in 2021 with the announcement of its own electric vehicle with a very eccentric design. Behind EV Electra is Lebanese-born Palestinian entrepreneur Jihad Mohammad, who made his fortune in the telecommunications business in Canada. In 2021, EV Electra bought a controlling stake in struggling electric vehicle startup Detroit Electric for $500 million, hoping to take advantage of its work, and now it has taken over the Emily GT project, having received the Sango unmanned shuttle project (also known as the PONS project) from NEVS. ).
The unmanned shuttle, of course, is of no value in the foreseeable future and will not bring in any money, but the Emily GT is a quite promising project, if, of course, it can be quickly revived and brought to mass production. Work on this project began in 2019; it was conceived as a family of premium electric vehicles with different bodies — sedan, station wagon, coupe, convertible. In the appearance of the NEVS Emily GT there is a sense of continuity with the later Saab models; fans of the Swedish brand generally reacted favorably to this project, but they do not believe in the life-giving power of the EV Electra. The fact is that Electra has not yet started producing its own EV cars; on the company’s website they exist only in the form of renderings.
Jihad Mohammad is not a fan of Saab, for him the deal with NEVS is just another business project, he treats skepticism about himself with humor, the Saab Planet resource quotes him as saying: “Of course, I will not produce no cars! I can’t even hold a screwdriver!” The point of the joke is that the Palestinian entrepreneur is not going to do something he doesn’t understand, and will attract the best specialists to launch Emily GT into production. Assembly is planned to be organized at a plant in Trollhättan, which is likely to require modernization after a long period of inactivity. It is not yet known under what brand EV Electra will produce the electric vehicles developed in Sweden.
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