Will Elio's car of the future hit the road?

New York

LAST year, Sean Donahue, a 37-year-old marketing director at a branding firm near San Diego, attended the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where - amid virtual reality goggles and 4K televisions - he saw a design that struck him as truly futuristic. "It looked like something out of the movie Gattaca," Mr Donahue said. "As a nerdy tech guy, I was enthralled with it."

The invention was a prototype of a two-seat three-wheeled car built by Elio Motors, a Phoenix-based startup founded by Paul Elio in 2008 with the mission to create an inexpensive, US-made, fuel-efficient vehicle.