Yulon/Luxgen: A Good Bet on Electric Vehicles

I don’t have money burning a hole in my pocket that I can’t wait to get into the stock market, but I do think a well-timed investment in the electric vehicle space makes sense. To that end, I’m always looking for publicly traded companies that are about to enter the EV space in a big, strategic way with products that sound competitive.

Ever hear of Yulon? It’s a huge contract Taiwanese manufacturing company that does a great deal of auto work for the Asian OEMs, especially Nissan. They have their own brand, “Luxgen,” that’s just about to enter the EV space, using a drive train made by my good friends at AC Propulsion.

I was out at the AC Propulsion R&D facility last week, speaking with CEO Tom Gage, and he seemed encouraged about Yulon. Of course, there is a lot that he and his people can’t say, so I try to read between the lines. I ask questions like:

“So you must be working with a large engineering team over there. How’s that going? Are there bugs in integrating your product? I’m sure certain members of the team are brighter than others. Does that concern you? Does management seem engaged, or do they have bigger fish to fry?”

Overall, things sound positive.

And I find it quite credible that terrific EVs will be coming out of Taiwan. Of course, their own market is small, and, given their issues with Mainland China, it’s not easy for them to sell into that market either. But they’re brilliant technologists, as they’ve proven over the past couple of decades, and the whole rest of the world is champing at the bit for high-quality, reasonably priced EVs.

Sounds like a good bet to me.