Lee Iacocca Saved Chrysler, Then He Became An E-Bike Pioneer

Lee Iacocca was an automotive legend. His resume includes feats that would be good enough for one career, but he hit one home run after another. His imprint is on the Ford Mustang, the Ford Pinto, Chrysler’s K-cars, and, well, saving Chrysler itself from the brink. There’s no doubt that the man loved cars, but Iacocca’s life didn’t entirely revolve around the car. Iacocca’s other ventures included co-authoring a best-selling autobiography, funding Type 1 Diabetes research, and oh yeah, he believed in a future of electric personal mobility. His company, EV Global Motors, was a pioneer in electric bicycles and small electric cars all the way back in the 1990s.

I was tipped off to Iacocca’s e-bike past thanks to David Tracy. As he was reminiscing about Chrysler killing Kenosha, Wisconsin’s part in the automotive industry, David stumbled upon Lee Iacocca’s lesser-known venture. After saving Chrysler from bankruptcy, Lee Iacocca began to think about the future of transportation. Iacocca believed that environmental concerns about vehicle emissions and high fuel prices would drive consumers out of their internal combustion vehicles and into smaller personal transports. Those vehicles wouldn’t be powered by new technology, but old power brought up to modern standards.

Iacocca saw a future where electricity would take over, first in small vehicles like bicycles before advancing to low-speed cars and eventually, full-size cars.

Setting The Stage

I won’t go through Iacocca’s entire career. That would take all day and honestly, not all of it is even relevant. For this story, we’re going back to 1978. Iacocca was just booted from Ford by Henry Ford II after 32 years of service. He left behind a legacy that included the Mustang, the Escort, the revival of Mercury, and convincing Henry Ford II to get the company back into racing. Despite Iacocca’s success and Ford’s resulting profits, Iacocca and Ford II were known for butting heads. Eventually, Ford II had enough and showed Iacocca the door.

Getting booted from Ford opened a new opportunity for Iacocca, bringing prosperity to another brand. Back then, Chrysler was on the ropes and desperately needed help. Chrysler spent some of the 1960s expanding into Europe by buying up brands and in the 1970s, Chrysler partnered up with Mitsubishi and sold Mitsubishi products as Chryslers. By the end of the decade, Chrysler was in trouble. The Henry Ford describes what happened next:

Iacocca took over a company in ruin. Chrysler was losing millions with little hope of recovery. His first and most important act was to secure a loan guarantee from the U.S. Congress. He then set about rebuilding the automaker’s product line. First came the K-Car, a highly-adaptable front-wheel drive platform that Chrysler offered under any number of makes, models and designs. Then came another vehicle that, like the Mustang before it, transformed the industry. The minivan, manifested in the Plymouth Voyager and the Dodge Caravan, was born of an idea Iacocca had toyed with at Ford to no avail. At Chrysler, the innovative minivan became a best-seller that redefined the family car for a generation of Americans. To top off his achievements, Iacocca added an evergreen marque to Chrysler’s lineup when he acquired American Motors and its enduring Jeep brand in 1987.

Eager to restore faith in Chrysler vehicles, Iacocca personally vouched for his products in a series of memorable television and print ads. He ended many of them with a simple, straightforward challenge to his audience: “If you can find a better car, buy it.” The ads were effective, and he enjoyed making them. In truth, he enjoyed the limelight. Through the 1980s, Iacocca added to his celebrity by writing two best-selling books, leading a successful effort to restore the Statue of Liberty, and appearing in a bit part on the popular TV series Miami Vice. For a time, there was even serious talk about Iacocca as a candidate for President of the United States.

Part of the K-car’s brilliance was the fact that it was scalable, allowing it to be used for a variety of models with plenty of parts sharing along the way. This was something that Chrysler struggled with in the past. Iacocca took a Chrysler that teetered on becoming history and turned it into a profit machine. And he did it with, in part, products that Ford chucked into the dustbin.

Remember, Chrysler did not invent the minivan. In the early 1970s, Ford experimented with minivans with the Mini-Max (above) and Carousel projects. The Mini-Max was even a front-wheel-drive compact vehicle just like Chrysler’s minivans would be. Ford spent most of the 1970s doing all of the hard work just to throw it away. Iacocca decided to do what Ford didn’t and made minivans a reality.

With Chrysler saved, but sales sliding, Iacocca took a bow and stepped down in 1992. Iacocca teamed up with Kirk Kerkorian for an attempted $22 billion hostile takeover of Chrysler, but this bid ultimately failed.

Going His Own Way

Before his retirement at Chrysler, Iacocca reportedly expressed an interest in creating what he called Global Motors. Iacocca already had relationships with Mitsubishi and Renault and thought Volkswagen and Fiat could merge together. In 1992, Fortune magazine figured Chrysler could partner up with Volkswagen and Ford. The magazine reported that Volkswagen could have used Chrysler to boost its sales while Ford could have used Chrysler’s development expertise. Of course, we know that Global Motors didn’t happen. Instead, Chrysler cozied up to Daimler in the infamous “Merger Of Equals.”

Global Motors would happen, but as an entirely different company than envisioned. Iacocca founded EV Global Motors in late 1996 to facilitate the creation of electric vehicles. EV Global Motors was backed by Italian and Swiss financiers and its products would be built by bicycle manufacturer Giant Co. in Taiwan. The EV Global Motors team was small, just 10 people, and had big dreams. As reported by Forbes, Iacocca believed that due to fuel prices and vehicle emissions, a market for electric vehicles was going to emerge. However, he thought this market would start with smaller vehicles like bicycles before moving to the car you drive to work. Reportedly, Iacocca was fascinated with EVs ever since his early days at Ford. He recalled Thomas Edison’s promise to Ford that he could make the internal combustion engine obsolete. That didn’t happen, but the 1990s looked promising.

Iacocca wasn’t alone. The 1990s were full of electric development. Zero Air Pollution (ZAP) opened its doors in 1994 and by 1999 it had sold 22,000 electric bicycles, scooters, motorcycles, and trikes. You’ve probably seen a ZAP product when you search for cheap motorcycles. Those weird Chinese trikes on Facebook Marketplace that always look run-down? Those are ZAP Xebras! ZAP was even going to be the distributor for Smart in the United States.

In the 1990s, municipal fleets experimented with electric buses, Ford made an electric Ranger, Honda had the EV Plus, Toyota had an electric RAV4, GM had the EV1, and Unique Mobility Inc., a company Iacocca would partner up with, had been developing electric technology since the 1980s. City utility companies were even installing EV chargers for these newly developed vehicles. And don’t forget the development of hybrid cars. If you were an automotive executive in the 1990s, EVs must have felt like they were just a few years away.

In 1999, Time Magazine published an article about Iacocca’s green effort. In it, Iacocca says “I spent all my life putting minivans and Jeeps in American garages. I think I have one vision left in me before I die, and it’s electric.” In the piece, Iacocca asks a rhetorical question: “Why does a girl need a 4WD sport-utility vehicle in Beverly Hills?” His answer to that question was an electric bicycle that the hypothetical SUV owner could use to get around.

Iacocca knew this bicycle would be a moonshot. Remember, this was the late 1990s. Electric bicycles were a new thing that people had no idea existed. So, Iacocca not only had to make a good product, but get people on it.

The E-Bike

According to a report from Deseret in 2000, Lee Iacocca credits the E-Bike’s look to an unnamed Mercedes designer. As far as engineering goes, Iacocca hired Mike Fritz as VP of Engineering and Product Development to lead engineering of the bicycle and future products. Fritz brought bicycle design experience from Huffy, Schwinn, Brunswick, and Pacific.

The E-Bike (yes, that was its name) launched in 1999 for a starting price of $995 ($1,859 today) and sold through car dealerships. The comfort model was $1,145 ($2,139 today). If you wanted a speedometer, that was $30, while fenders were $70 and bags were $50.

Attached to the frame of the E-Bike was a removable 24-volt lead-acid battery, two 12-volt batteries tied together. That fed a Heinzmann 400-watt geared brushed motor in the rear. The quoted range was 20 miles and the top speed was a leisurely 15 mph. Like the personal mobility devices of today, the E-Bike was driven by pedals and by a thumb throttle on the handlebars. You also got some motorcycle-like features including a horn, a front suspension, cruise control, lights, mirrors, an ignition, and a battery indicator. All of this rode on a steel hardtail frame. Later, the 77-pound EVG E-Bike would get upgraded to a 36-volt battery, which drove the price to around $1,700 ($3,177 today).

The 36-volt version came with an SX model for $1,895 ($3,447 today), which included disc brakes, the $1,595 ($2,901 today) LE, which was marketed for climbing hills, and the Police, which came with a trunk, siren, and extra battery.

This bicycle would be considered low-tech today. Most of today’s e-bikes roll with lithium batteries and brushless motors. However, consider that these bikes first hit the road a whole 25 years ago! Iacocca was also a bit too far ahead of his time. He wanted to outfit these bikes with more than just lead-acid batteries. Iacocca convinced Fritz to outfit the EVG E-Bike with lithium batteries. However, some of these batteries caught fire, causing a recall of 2,000 units.

Iacocca really believed in the bikes. In an interview, he said:

“I’ve spent 50 years in the auto industry, putting one and sometimes two cars in a lot of garages. Now we need to replace one of these cars with an electric car. It my take a while to get the right battery but I believe it will happen. In the meantime, we’ll start with bicycles and scooters to lead the electric revolution.”

E-Bikes were only the beginning. Iacocca saw a future where customers moved from the bikes to scooters. Eventually, they’d buy a low-speed electric vehicle and when it became ready, an electric minivan. In 2001, Iacocca formed another company, Lido Motors USA, to create electric cars. That year, Lido Motors said the electric minivan was around five years out.

But to get there, Iacocca had to sell bikes. His plans were ambitious, too. In the Time Magazine interview, Iacocca indicated that he wanted to sell 1,000 E-Bikes a week. That’s over 50,000 units a year, and he expected to do it from the very first year. I couldn’t find exact production numbers, but in 2001, EV Global Motors claimed “tens of thousands” of sales from a distribution network of over 150 dealers.

It’s unclear what happened to EV Global Motors, but the newest E-Bike I could find is allegedly a 2005. Lido Motors USA also didn’t appear to get very far. Lido Motors did create the Lido, a fiberglass-bodied golf cart with a 40-mile range and a 25 mph top speed. One of them is pictured a few paragraphs above.

Lido made a coupe, truck, and sedan version of its golf carts, but never that all-electric minivan. It would appear that the Lido Motors name is still around in some form, still being used for golf carts. What I can say is that in some news reports, some complained about the cost of the E-Bike.

If you want to own one of these E-Bikes today, they do sometimes show up for sale online. Though, be warned that you’ll be riding something solidly in the past. The batteries will likely be far past their prime, too. However, I have found that you can get the batteries rebuilt. While researching this piece, I found a photo of an EV Global E-Bike that someone made their own battery for, so it sounds like anything is possible.

Lee Iacocca did not get to complete his dream of selling everything from electric bicycles to electric minivans, but he was still decades ahead of his time. His company made what sounded like a competent e-bike long before electric bicycles and the “e-bike” term itself became popular in America. And while he may not have gotten to create that electric minivan, Iacocca did live long enough to see EVs become a lucrative market, only it happened just a bit later than he predicted.

Update: A reader points out that EV Global Motors previously existed as the “Electric Bicycle Company,” founded by none other than Malcolm Bricklin. The Bricklin company’s e-bike design, called the EV Warrior, was different than the EVG E-Bike and resembled a regular bicycle but with an electric motor and battery perched on top of the rear wheel. According to Brad Rourke, who was the director of government and community affairs in the Bricklin project, the e-bikes were legally classified as “motor driven cycles,” which required them to have full lighting, VINs, and to be compliant with vehicle regulations.

As Automotive News reported, Bricklin told car dealerships that selling an electric bicycle would enhance sales and bring excitement to showrooms. California’s Zero-Emission Vehicle mandate was also looming. When the Electric Bicycle Company failed, Lee Iacocca reportedly bought the remaining scraps, launched the remains as EV Global Motors, and introduced a new bike.

Update: A reader found this WTVJ News segment with none other than Bob Mayer interviewing Lee Iacocca!