Light Bulb Moment

5:30 am. I’m awake. And I have been for a while. A few days ago, I saw a plan that I had worked on for several months, coming to a brutal end. I’m not going to elaborate on that, but sometime, difficult moments help to put things into perspective. In this case, the ‘light bulb-moment’ at 5: 30 am was a decision to take over this company, founded a few years earlier, and at the doorstep of going out of business. Not the brightest idea ever, I admit. Especially since the business of classic cars was going through tougher times lately.

I must have said it out loud, that morning, what I was thinking,  as my wife woke up and produced a vaguely interrogative sound. Anyway, long story short: here we are. We’re six months later, we’ve taken over Chicane Classics, and have spent the last few months wondering how to transform this company into Chicane Classics 2.0. You should know that at the time of taking over the company, all assets were a Mercedes 190 SL broken down into a few hundred pieces. A fabulous bodywork, that’s true. But apart from that: a lot of work.

Our first idea to sell it as such, wasn’t a great success. No surprise, frankly. So circumstances forced us to speed things up. We were going to go electric. And not in a few years’ time, but straight away. Electrification had been our vision right from the start, but we merely thought of it as something we had to put in place in the long term. As things were unfolding, it started to look as if the time was now.

If we were to finish that car and restore it to its former glory, we could as well transform it into an EV, right? And that’s exactly what we’re about to do. An exciting adventure, that you can follow right here.