Corbin Sparrow

Mike Corbin had won his high-school science fair with an electric robot, served as an electrician on the aircraft carrier USS Ranger and worked as an electrical subcontractor to Pratt & Whitney in the Vietnam years. In 1968 he founded Corbin Gentry, and by 1971 it was making motorcycle seats, frames, tanks and handlebars.source 1

Corbin Motors, the company he ran with his son Tom, began work on an electric car in January 1996.source 2 That year it showed the Personal Transit Module at the San Francisco auto show: one seat, three wheels, a body in plastic composite and a 20 kW motor, charged in six hours from a 110 V socket. Corbin claimed 121–129 km/h (75–80 mph), 40–80 km (25–50 miles) on a charge and a running cost of about a cent a mile, and in the week of the show he took more than US$1 million in deposits, with no factory and no staff to build it.source 1

A motorcycle with a roof

With two wheels in front and one behind, the Sparrow was a three-wheeler, and in law a motorcycle. Its owners needed a motorcycle licence and motorcycle insurance, but no helmet, because the rider was enclosed.source 1 Car crash-test rules did not apply to it, and it passed its final Department of Transportation certification tests in April 1999.source 2 In September 1999, by English Wikipedia’s account, the line at Hollister, California, was building cars; Makes That Didn’t Make It has production beginning in mid-1998, with deliveries from late 1999.source 2source 1 Corbin also built the Merlin, a petrol-engined three-wheeler, as a coupé and a roadster.source 2

The car is 2,438 mm (96 in) long and 1,219 mm (48 in) wide, and it weighs 612 kg (1,350 lb).source 3source 1 Almost 272 kg (600 lb) of that was 13 lead-acid batteries of 12 V, and they were its weak point: one failing battery could shut down the whole system, and the motor controllers failed too.source 1 No road test of the period has been found; the troubles are known from owners’ reports, as Makes That Didn’t Make It gives them.source 1 The original body, with its rounded tail, was nicknamed the “Jelly Bean”. A hatchback version, the “Pizza Butt”, was taken up by delivery services.source 3 It is one of the best-known American electric microcars.

About 289 were built, by the count of Makes That Didn’t Make It; English Wikipedia says fewer than 300.source 1source 2 On 31 March 2003 Corbin Motors filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, and the court passed its assets to Ron Huch’s Phoenix Environmental Motors, which tried to revive the car; there was talk of building it with SLP in Canada.source 2 Corbin looked back on it plainly.

No more gas

On 5 August 2004 an Ohio businessman, Dana Myers, bought the rights from Huch and formed Myers Motors at Tallmadge, Ohio. In April 2006 it put an upgraded car on sale as the MM NmG, for “No more Gas”.source 2source 3 In June 2008 it cost US$29,995 before tax and shipping, and in 2009 lithium batteries doubled its range to about 97 km (60 miles).source 3source 2 Underneath it was still the Sparrow, the same size and weight, with a 20 kW motor rated for continuous output, DC or three-phase AC. English Wikipedia gives it 112 km/h (70 mph), 32–64 km (20–40 miles) on lead-acid batteries and a consumption of about 130 Wh/km, which it puts at 162 miles per US gallon equivalent.source 3 Myers also announced a two-seater, the Duo, for “Doesn’t Use Oil”.source 2 In February 2013 the NmG disappeared from the “Buy your NmG” page of Myers’s website, and late that year the federal rebate for electric three-wheelers came to an end.source 3source 2 Myers built about 30.source 1 One source has Myers closing about 2006, but the price of 2008, the lithium cars of 2009 and the website of 2013 all say otherwise.source 1source 3source 2

Neither name let go. In 2012 Corbin announced a Sparrow 2, built to order, with lithium batteries, an 80 hp (60 kW) AC motor, scissor doors and a reversing camera; his website still described it as in “beta testing”, with orders planned for 2018, and whether any reached a customer is not known.source 1 Myers Motors became Myers EV in 2018 and took pre-orders for the Point5, a two-seat “half-car” with the seats in tandem, planned for late 2024.source 2

No count of surviving Sparrows has been found, nor any club or auction result. With about 289 Sparrows and about 30 NmGs built, there cannot be many. The photographs on this page show Sparrows in The Hague’s Louwman Museum, the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles and on display in Japan, and others still on the road in Seattle in 2012 and at an electric-vehicle meeting in 2016.