Company founded by Neil Young sued over warehouse fire sparked by hybrid car
By Joshua Melvin
Posted: 01/20/2012 07:28:31 AM PST
The company founded by rocker Neil Young to convert his one-of-a-kind LincVolthybrid electric car is being sued for nearly $500,000 after the vehicle sparked a fire that seriously damaged two San Carlos warehouses in 2010, according to a lawsuit.
The suit, filed Tuesday by Unigard Insurance Co., says LincVolt LLC, which lists Young as an officer, was negligent when it converted the 1959 Lincoln Continental to run on electricity and a biodiesel-powered generator.
“The altering of a gas-powered 1959 vehicle and its components is an extreme departure from what a reasonably careful person would do,” Unigard Insurance Co. claims in the suit filed in San Mateo County Superior Court. [1]
A malfunction while the car was charging set off a three-alarm blaze on Quarry Road on Nov. 9, 2010, that caused about $1 million in damage. Most of the damage was done to a lifetime of rock ‘n’ roll memorabilia — instruments, photos and film footage as well as the Lincoln — Young had stored in the warehouse.
The La Honda resident did not immediately respond to a request for comment, which was routed to his management.
Unigard claims it paid out $482,000 to Al Schick, the owner of the building, to cover damage caused by the fire. The blaze started in the neighboring warehouse, which also belongs to Schick, and was rented out to Young. Unigard is suing to get that money back from LincVolt LLC.
Attorney Peter Lynch, who lodged the suit on behalf of Unigard, didn’t respond to a phone message seeking comment. Schick, who continues to rent a warehouse to Young, declined to talk abut the suit but said he and Young are on good terms.
“I’ve never had any problems with Neil,” he added. “They were very responsive” after the fire.
One of the biggest casualties of the fire was the Lincoln itself. Young assembled a team of workers in 2008 to convert the 19½-foot, 2½ ton behemoth from gasoline to hybrid power, an effort he chronicled in a four-part film series. But after the fire, it was left a burned-out shell.
Young opted to have the vehicle rebuilt, and the progress has been tracked by posts on the website devoted to the Lincoln. As of Friday, the car was in Orange County undergoing driving tests. It will be headed back to Brizio Street Rods in South San Francisco before heading up to Sacramento for painting.
The website promises that the rebuilt version will be as unique as its precursor.
“LincVolt has been redesigned in and out,” the website says. An aerodynamic cover on the Lincoln’s underside will help in “reducing drag and allowing LincVolt to cut through the air more efficiently than ever before at high speeds.”
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[1] if it wasn’t so much fun, this is hilarious! “what a reasonably careful person would do,” Unigard Insurance Co. claims” hahahaha! Those lame staticians from an insurance company would know what a risk is?
“ Physical vision – one could say scientific vision – brings about a metaphysical shift in the observer’s view of reality as a whole. The geography of the earth, or the structure of the solar system, are in an instant utterly changed, and forever. The explorer, the scientific observer, the literary reader experience the sublime: a moment of revelation into the idea of the unbounded, the infinite.
The disastrous fire that destroyed LV1 has offered us an unbelievable opportunity to make improvements throughout the car in the LV2 version. These improvements will allow LV2 to boast superior performance and be even cleaner than LV1.
January and February have been busy months for the LincVolt project. We are restoring the body of LincVolt by carefully and selectively replacing damaged body parts in the original car. A 1958 donor car (a gift from my wife) with many identical parts is parked alongside LincVolt. Under the direction of famed California hot rod builder Roy Brizio (Brizio Street Rods) LincVolt’s 1959 body is being painstakingly restored at Camilleri’s Auto Works back to its original condition.
In LV2 the dashboard’s original Lincoln Continental instrument cluster is being repurposed to monitor the functions of the new 200 KW electric drive and 30 KW Capstone Micro Turbine power generation systems. We found that the original Lincoln instrumentation layout was superior in user friendliness to the one we had installed in LV1. Now we have a chance to improve that.
We are also adding a midline control console in LV2 that runs between two new front bucket seats. The console will house an additional multi-purpose touch-screen control monitor.
We are in discussions with wall charger manufacturers. Soon we will be making our final choice. We are being very careful because the wall charger was most suspicious as a potential cause of the fire that destroyed LV1, although we are still awaiting more analysis to determine the exact cause. An identical charger was found responsible for the fire that destroyed a Canadian entry into the X-Prize.
Battery system technology has improved greatly during the last 4 years and continues to improve. We are dedicated to getting the best and safest batteries available today for LV2. We have found both American and a Canadian companies that offer battery packs superior to the Chinese batteries we utilized in LV1 and we expect a dramatic improvement.
The direction of our project remains the same. We believe it is more efficient to go with the flow than to go against the flow. People want big cars and will resist losing them as a choice. Re-powering the American Dream will not be an easy task. With each day that passes we are joined by more people who share our goal. We feel that new cars and the energy sources that power them should not only be aimed at “economy” and a “smaller is better” philosophy. North America is big and it needs big cars and pick-up trucks. These vehicles are on our roads everywhere and cannot just be written off as unrealistic. People need choice. People want big and small energy efficient cars and trucks as part of the American life style.
Fisker is one manufacturer going a long way in the direction we believe in. The GM Volt also represents a step forward for Detroit. Neither car offers freedom of choice in the fuel they run on like Lincvolt does, but we think they still are great cars even though they are powered by gasoline. When they are “plugged in” they provide cleaner transportation that costs less than a conventional car of the same size and they both have an electric range that meets today’s average demands.
Where Lincvolt is unique, aside from the way the car looks, the emotions it stirs in the hearts of those who remember another time, or its immense size, is the choice of fuels it can burn to generate electricity. LV2 uses bio-diesel. It can use regular diesel or any blend of the two and burn the fuel cleanly in the onboard Capstone Micro Turbine. When the turbine burns Bio Diesel Lincvolt is twice as clean as the USA average grid per KW generated. This means LincVolt, an immense luxury cruiser from 1959, can run as clean as a 2011 Nissan Leaf and run further without “plug in” recharging.
We are planning to be on the road filming again with LV2 in late summer 2011. We will then complete our film, an immense 4 years in the making. Shakey Pictures post production and editing with Ben Johnson, son of the late Larry Johnson, original Project Lincvolt team member, has begun and the film is looking great. We have a story to tell.
To our sponsors and readers, thanks for your continued support.
-The Project LincVolt team.
Posted in LincVolt | Comments Off on PROJECT LINCVOLT PROGRESS 2011
Of my soul” by -- from \'Natural Beauty\' - Neil Young
Neil Young on Tour
Sugar Mountain setlists
Tom Hambleton provides BNB with setlists, thankfully. His website is the most comprehensive searchable archives on the Internets about anything Neil Young related setlists. Goto Sugar Mountain.
memphish on 
Albert Stromann on 
liza on 
Baz on 
