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I'm not a car guy but besides Morgan what about Sunbeam Alpine Tiger, DeTomaso Pantera, Lotus and Shelby Cobras as iconic cars with bought-in engines? In motorcycles there's Brough, Cotton, any number of manufacturers of bikes using Villiers, Sachs, Rotax or F. Morini engines, Bimota (whose in-house 500cc 2T engine helped bankrupt them), etc.
Building a chassis is a much easier and less capital-intensive job than designing, building and certifying a modern auto engine and transmission. Chassis parts are +/- .01" fab jobs, not +/- .0005" precision machining.
If Elio is struggling to get enough money to build the chassis, then adding millions of dollars to their financial outlay to design and build their own engine (which would probably largely have to be a "me too" copy of existing technology) seems pretty dumb.
Of course, if they have no real intention of ever getting into production and are instead just milking the investors for what they can, then pie in the sky "we're going to build an engine and transmission too!" plans might be a good thing. "Please, we only need another $30 million dollars and we can build our maybe as good as someone else's engine too . . ."
Perhaps they should make their own tires and buy a steel and aluminum plant, and open an electronics branch to design and build the ECU, etc etc etc.
There are good reasons why even major firms like BMW (which is quite capable of building its own engines) go to reputable firms like Rotax and buy either an already existing engines (like the older Rotax 2T and 4T singles) or commission a new design.
cheers,
Michael
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