The idea behind EV Global Motors was to design and market battery-powered bicycles, and later to develop electric scooters and light electric vehicles similar to golf carts. Said Iacocca, "I spent 50 years polluting the world. … Now it's time to do something cleaner and better."

Iacocca's interest in electric vehicles reportedly dates to his early days at Ford Motor Company nearly 50 years ago. And back in 1992, while still at Chrysler, he introduced an electric minivan. But while there was clearly interest in electric-powered vehicles in past decades, the technology never achieved practicality. In 1999, Iacocca told TIME magazine, "Thomas Edison promised Henry Ford he would be able to throw away the internal-combustion engine. ... It's 100 years later, and we're just now seeing some progress."

Teaming with Taiwan’s Giant Manufacturing to build the bike, Iacocca promised production within a year. The bike would be equipped with a 35-pound, detachable, battery-powered motor, have a range of 16 miles and a top speed of 20 miles an hour, and sell for approximately US$ 1,000.

With sales projections of 50,000 E-Bikes for the first year through bike shops, auto dealers, and the Internet, Iacocca was confidently predicting that he would eventually sell one million bikes a year, even though no one else had so far been able to sell more than a few thousand electric bikes in the United States in any given year.

Although wide-scale production of electric cars was still not feasible, Iacocca said, "The market for bikes and scooters is huge." According to reports, Iacocca was drawing no salary, but had invested US$ 600,000 of his own money in EV Global and had raised another US$ 10 million from investors, primarily in Switzerland and Sweden.

In spite of Iacocca's initial hopes for a summer 1998 release date, the first electric bikes did not ship to dealers until March 1999. At that time, Iacocca was still looking at automobile dealers as the primary distributors of the bike. For US$ 10,000, a dealer would be assigned an exclusive sales territory. "The dealer franchise system set up by Henry Ford is a damn good one," he told the Los Angeles Business Journal shortly after the first E-Bikes went to the dealers (April 5, 1999).

Meanwhile, Iacocca insisted that although he had been working harder over the past few months than he had during his last two years at Chrysler, he was now involved in a totally different kind of work. Iacocca had by this time invested an undisclosed sum in Taiwanese motorcycle maker Kwang Yang Motor Co. to produce bikes for sale in Taiwan and for export.

In 1999, TIME disclosed that industry insiders were questioning Iacocca’s projection of 50,000 sales for the first year (February 1, 1999). There was no great demand, many pointed out, for environmentally correct transportation. Although the potential market in China and Asia was enormous (there are an estimated 500 million human-powered bicycles in China), EV Global's US$ 995 sticker price placed the E-Bike well out of the price range of these potential customers.

The U.S. market seemed particularly soft beyond the environmentally conscious state of California and perhaps retirement communities in the Southwest. Nevertheless, Iacocca told TIME, "The electric bike is a lifestyle thing – and we'll get a lot of interest out there if we play this right." By some accounts, he was aiming for an electric bike in every garage in America. He was now comparing his bike to the minivan, which he pointed out, had no market until Chrysler created one.

In May 2000, Iacocca claimed to be on a roll, having recently signed up Total EV to distribute his bicycles. The news did sound promising – Total EV had a network of some 500 independent bike dealers. Iacocca said in Electric Vehicle Online Today, "It was time to reinvent the wheel.… By putting electric bicycles in every garage, we'll improve our quality of life, help clean up the environment, and have a little fun!"

A year later, in May 2001, Iacocca was whistling a slightly less jaunty tune. That month, Fastcompany.com quoted him as saying: "You have to change as your customers' lives change. I've followed baby boomers all of my business life. I got them first with the Mustang around 1964. And then 20 years later, when they acquired kids, dogs, and nannies, I got them again with the minivan. Now I'm planning to get them again with the electric bike. But in a downturn, you have to knuckle down and ask yourself, ‘What the hell really works here?’ We started out distributing our bike through car dealers. Now we see that we've also got to move into areas like resort communities and rentals. Even after all of these years, I still have to get back to fundamentals: If you don't have the right distribution system, you've got a problem."

That September, Forbes Magazine reported that EV Global had only sold 12,000 E-Bikes, a number far below Iacocca's earlier projections. And Iacocca himself was admitting that he had not made any money on them. Although by 2001 EV Global had emerged as the leading seller of electric bikes in the United States, outselling such competitors as Giant Bicycle and Currie, it still couldn't find a sizeable market for the bike. Later The Financial Times would note rumors that Iacocca had been trying to sell EV Global to DaimlerChrysler (March 19, 2002).

Perhaps acknowledging a flat tire, Iacocca next set his sights on marketing his company's oversized electric-powered golf cart. Called the Lido (Iacocca's first name), the vehicle looks more like a toy than a serious means of transportation. But even if the Lido draws no more interest than the E-Bike, it still may earn a profit – for a rather quirky reason. Because California has mandated that automakers must sell at least two percent of their California fleet as zero-pollution emitters starting in 2003, the auto industry is interested in marketing the Lido in California. Each Lido sold there stands to bring Iacocca US$ 20,000 in electric car credits, plus approximately US$ 5,000 from the US$ 10,000 sticker price.

What went wrong with E-Bike? A spokesperson for EV Global Motors offered her assessment of the E-Bike's disappointing market: "It's a very new product. It's not something that a lot of people are aware of. That's a problem with every electric product in the industry. The electric industry is not getting a lot of exposure and coverage because a lot of people don't want to take on this new foreign thing. It's going to take a long time for it to catch on. And maybe this might not be the right time.… We're just hanging on here and trying to make an impact on the industry with everybody else who is trying to do it."

Randall Frost is a freelance writer based in Pleasanton, CA. His work has been published by the New England Financial Journal, CBSHealthWatch, Modern Drug Discovery, Outdoor California and Gale.