How did Reva come about?
Chetan Maini: When I was at the University of Michigan in 1990 I had a chance to be part of a solar electric car race. We raced from Florida to Michigan, and our university team came first. General Motors then sponsored us in the 2,000-mile World Solar Challenge from Darwin to Adelaide in Australia. We were just a bunch of kids from college, but we came third in the world, right behind Honda. That seemed very exciting to me. If you could cross a continent with solar energy, this technology had to have a great future. My focus at that time was on India, on the kind of pollution I’d seen growing up, and this offered a solution. We used to all talk about building electric cars when we graduated. The father of one of my friends, Lon Bell, liked our ideas so much he set up a company. So I ended up at a startup in the early 1990s called Amerigon, developing core electric vehicle technologies. I took a break and did grad school in electrical and mechanical engineering, and then came back to t
