First, the real Lotus seven.....

[s2k7]

then came the rest:

I guess Ariel Atom is not immune to the same trend.

 

....and this is funny to read: http://www.exocars.net/showthread.php?t=17789

 

Reminds me of the court fight between Caterham vs Westfield -- at the end they can't stop the flood of other marques.

 

Apparently, Dennis Palatov involved importing a bunch Atom China and sold here in the USA for $12,000 (at ebay) as oppose of buying $63,000 for the TMI ariel atom roller.

 

This too will never stop coming. Exact copy !

[rzempel]

Unfortunately it did stop coming. The last kit sold in November.

[s2k7]

Unfortunately it did stop coming. The last kit sold in November.

 

ain't over til it's over

I heard alibaba (twice larger than amazon) is now in the mix

If there's a market....it will come.

[NVP66S]

I read that thread. It looks to me like the Chinese chassis manufacturer made 20 more than they thought their local market would absorb, and sold 20 through a 3rd party (AltraImports, Palatov) and not through Ariel. After that 20 sold, there are no more. Now I wonder if they or someone else will add more? Or are there enough exoskeleton cars already on the market?

 

There's an interesting sub thread going about patents, copyrights, and design patents. This reminds me of the Selden/Ford patent battle. There, Selden had the patent on the gasoline automobile and wouldn't grant Ford a license. The legal fight took so long that Ford sold a lot of cars and had enough profits to fight and win. It is slowly sinking into this engineer's head what is actually meant by 'branding'.

 

Everything I write is strictly my own opinion.

Edited December 14, 2014 by NVP66S

[s2k7]

"There's an interesting sub thread going about patents, copyrights, and design patents."

 

This, probably will work in a civilized world - but under china, they have a complete absence of law and common morals. No one trusts any contract or agreement in China because they are always broken by the Chinese and there is no legal protection whatsoever. Just what bolus said from the sub thread: "They encourage kids to use plagiarism in school. How are you going to convince them that's its wrong."

[speedwagon]

when will we learn as a country-- you cannot play fair with those who don't understand that there are rules. We are going to lose. And our business leaders are paving the way.

[jimrankin]

Back in the '80's I was worried that all our local manufacturing was leaving for Japan and a few other smaller Asian countries. When I mentioned this at a project meeting with the principal of a large silicone valley company he said " Don't worry about Japan, they have honor and laws. China is going to be the problem because they have neither and no concern for their own common people, much less anyone or anything else". Seems he was pretty spot on.

I have watched two friends businesses go down the drain from having exact duplicate products, made in China, take away all their foreign sales. They can spend a lot of time and money fighting the imports to the USA but obtaining foreign patents for every country you are selling to is too expensive and time consuming and you usually cant stop the imports while your fighting them to quit.

My entire extended family decided to quit giving Christmas gifts (except to the younger children) quite some time ago, basically because we had a hard time finding ANYTHING that wasn't made in China. You even have to be careful when buying Christmas cards, even the expensive ones are most often made in China.

Blame whoever you want, lawyers, big business, liberals, conservatives, welfare, you name it, but the real truth is that we bought it and wouldn't spend the extra few percent it would cost to make it here. Now that we can't make so much of what we want here anymore were stuck with buying Chinese's or going without, ad we all know how the average American feels about going without.

[Kitcat]

Walmart is famous for telling American suppliers to move operations to China or else.

 

Gotta say, Channelock is still American made, right in my home town of Meadville, PA.

 

But factories there that directly employed 8,000 local folks (including me for a while) all moved out of the country (after 1st going to the anti-union sunbelt).