Fans and critics of Elio Motors noticed the site go down earlier in December ’22.
Update: Dec 13, 2022 – Eliomotors.com is back online! Looks like they finally renewed their hosting fees, after all.
Earlier last week Elio Motors reservation holders, fans of the brand, but mostly critics noticed that ElioMotors.com, their official website, is down.
Visiting the site as of this blog post brings up the classic 404 not found error.
Archive.org noticed the site returned a similar error code and did not load on December 9,2022.
Blogs and articles that popped up shortly after took this as another sign that the company is surely headed towards bankruptcy and insolvency.
While nothing official has come from Elio Motors HQ re their down website, it’s worth looking at where the site stood before it went down.
Publicly available information about ElioMotors.com worth noting.
First, here’s how ElioMotors.com looked like before it went down.
Next, we can look at the domain name, ElioMotors.com. According to and coincidentally GoDaddy’s WhoIs tool, ElioMotors.com’s uses GoDaddy for its name servers and the domain is set to expire January 13, 2023.
Despite that being the date whoever is paying for ElioMotors.com’s technically should’ve paid for an annual (or multi-year) renewal, the domain name is parked for, according to Spamzilla, at least a month before it can be bought/used on the open market.
So, the question is, will Paul Elio pay to renew his domain?
With 2022 wrapping up, we’ll find out soon enough.
Then there’s who hosts ElioMotors.com.
According to a host checking website Elio Motors, we technically don’t know who actually owns the servers where all ElioMotors.com’s files sit, but we can see it’s using Cloudflare to save and display a cache of its site which is what most people will see when they went to ElioMotors.com
Finally, there’s the amount of web traffic that ElioMotors.com received prior to going down. While Similar Web’s traffic estimator tool isn’t 100 percent accurate, in my experience with my own website traffic, it’s within the ballpark and is a fairly representative of the actual figures.
According to SimilarWeb, ElioMotors.com got about 20,000 visits per month over the last three months.
While that might seem like a lot, in terms of web hits per day and compared to some even small to medium-sized websites, 20,000 visits is an tiny amount of hits.
To put that in comparison, ElectraMeccanica, another three-wheeled EV company that actually makes and sells EV trikes, according to SimilarWeb, their website gets 7x as much traffic (about 140,000 hits a month.)
And, just to put even that in perspective, the EV powerhouse Tesla gets about 15 million hits a month.
Here’s why that small amount of web traffic is so interesting.
If you’re familiar with hosting websites, buying hosting for a site that can handle around 20,000 hits (or even 200,000+ hits) per month is extremely cheap.
In my experience, basic shared hosting plans costing between $3-15 a month (like this one from BlueHost) has more than enough server space and CPU capabilities to handle that much traffic and, if set up correctly with caching (like Cloudflare) can handle even more so.
My point is, whoever decided to let ElioMotors.com go down, it wasn’t a matter of if they could afford hosting because anyone with some spare change in their bank account can swing the site for another year, it was a calculated and purposeful decision.
Since Elio Motors announced they’re going EV last year, no one’s hardly heard from the company.
However, according to ElioOwners.com, there was a response from someone who runs Elio Motors’s Better Business Bureau profile to a customer complaint back in May.
Here’s a screenshot of their response below.
According to that response, it sounded to me a lot like Elio Motors was, at that point, still trying to string along customers and prospective buyers and that there’s some kind of plan in place to keep this whole thing afloat.
Which, if that’s true, makes their website going down that much more confusing.
Another $100(ish) dollars to keep the site up for another year to, as devious as it sounds, extract a handful of more reservations would be worth the “investment.”
Just in general, getting the site back up is the least they can do to keep the lines of communication, with whatever the next steps for Elio Motors will be, open between their company and reservation holders plus media and the general public.
For customers that put in reservations as far back as 2014, I think they deserve to know what’s going on.
Did Paul Elio have a change of heart and decided to call the whole thing off once and for all and this website going 404 is the first card in the house of cards to go down?
As mentioned, them letting their domain name expire in January would be further proof that that’s the case.
Then again, the, in my opinion (an opinion held by MANY others) grift can go on and someone can/might hit RENEW SERVICE on their hosting plan to get the site back up ASAP.
