Think on the road to recovery, gets $60 million in new funding
Since Ford decided to discard Norwegian electric vehicle manufacturer Think a few years ago the crew at the company has been working on a revival. They have developed a new second-generation model and recently inked a deal with Tesla Motors to purchase lithium ion battery packs from the Silicon Valley startup.
Think (also written Th!nk) CEO Jan-Olaf Willums has now corralled $60 million in new funding from an investment group including retailer Stein-Erik Hagen, hotel developer Petter Stordalen and shipping heir Petter Sundt. Willums and his partners bought Think out bankruptcy in early 2006 and recently got development work going at the company. With the new funding, Think is expected to start building cars toward the end of this year.
Currently the company has production capacity for 3,500 cars a year on a single shift or double that with two shifts, but they need to sell 10,000 annually to be profitable. As a result they are looking at new production sites outside of Norway. The United States, UK, Holland and Switzerland are all potential plant sites. If things work out the company hopes to be building (and selling!) 10,000 electric cars a year by 2009.
[Source: www.aftenposten.no, thanks to Mulad for the tip]
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