Can Arizona grow EVs in the desert?

I am practical, and probably boring, about cars. I have never owned one that makes people on street corners and outdoor cafes stare at me. But recently I was ogled in a vehicle that wasn’t particularly flashy or expensive. I think people were gawking because the car I was test-driving, an ElectraMeccanica Solo, is delightful, unusual and impossible to figure out with just a glance. So everybody stared — and smiled.
The Solo looks like something a sushi chef might concoct with a knife capable of slicing a full-sized car in half, precisely and with a bit of whimsy. It has one seat, two doors, three wheels and is technically considered a motorcycle. But it is fully enclosed in a lightweight, aerospace-composite chassis, has a comfortable cockpit, a digital instrument cluster, solid audio, air conditioning, heat, a camera for backing up, a little trunk
and most other car stuff except extra seats and fellow passengers. You feel the road while driving it, and it handles and accelerates like a champ.
And the Solo is an electric vehicle. It can travel about 100 miles on a charge and has a sticker price of $18,500 — about $23,000 to $113,000 less than Tesla Inc.’s least and most expensive models. It’s truly an EV for the masses. It’s also an ambassador for a manufacturing boomlet in Arizona and elsewhere in the Southwest — which, in turn, offers other states a road map for attracting cutting-edge industries and promising startups.
While ElectraMeccanica Vehicles Corp, and its chief executive officer, Paul Rivera, vetted several states when the Canadian company was looking for a production home in the US, they ultimately settled on Arizona. Lighter taxes, looser regulations, a sophisticated economic ecosystem and a lower cost of living than neighbouring states such as California informed that decision, but two other factors were pivotal.
Arizona offered access to a talented labour pool, and the state went out of its way to help the company solve its problems — including coordinating a ride-sharing experiment central to its marketing plans.
“We get just one chance to do this. The vehicle has got to be right,” Rivera said. “The five municipalities around Phoenix stepped up and enabled us to test Solo-share. You know how hard it is to get municipalities to agree on anything?”
ElectraMeccanica recently broke ground on a state-of-the-art, 235,000-square-foot engineering facility in Mesa that will begin pumping out cars next year. It hopes to assemble 20,000 Solos and employ as many as 500 full-time workers there.

—Bloomberg