burtlancast
Member
- Joined
- Jan 1, 2013
- Messages
- 3,263
Guy Negre is that french maverick engineer who claimed to have built an air-powered car able to reach 110km/h and 200 km autonomy.
I've followed his struggle since 1999, when he first started making waves in the media.
A lot of people sent him money hoping to be the firsts to get the new car. But he just couldn't get any traction; banks refused to finance him, the french IRS kept asking for endless accounting verifications, rival auto makers started suing him, and the french government refused to license his car.
He has more than a 100 engineering patents to his name. He never offered a test drive to the press in order to check his claimed performances.
Around 2007, badly needing funds, he sold the rights of his car to Indian car giant TATA MOTORS, which saved his company MDI from going bust.
In 2014, just when Tata motors was about to start mass-producing the car, it's english CEO decided to jump of from a skyscrapper to his death, and the whole thing came to a halt.
Guy Negre died last june at 75 years; no cause of death was announced.
His son seems to want to keep the MDI company going.
Here's a page with his professional background: voorbeeld
In his younger days, he had tried building a rotative engine, and had gone bankrupt.
I'm gutted.
