I can supply some information about who wants (or more accurately, wanted) Freedom Motors engines, and what I think is the source of the claim that they have letters of intent/memorandums of understanding/conditional orders for 3.5 million engines.
…and you will find a long document filed with the SEC. It’s related to the proposed Reg A stock offering that never happened. On page 157 and subsequently, you can find the letters of intent. They’re all from the 2008 – 2012 time period.
I’ve totaled the demand for engines on the various letters (some don’t actually state quantities), and I get 3.24 million engines, which matches up pretty well with the 3.5 million engines that Freedom Motors claims to have conditional orders for.
At least 2.4 million of the total is from companies that are now defunct, so obviously those orders no longer exist. Visionary Vehicles still exists, but their current car concept is pure electric, so the 250,000 engines per year that they projected (I recorded that as 250,000 engines in my summary) won’t be needed. Alturdyne is a real enough company, and mentioned a potential demand for 500,000 engines in a total market, but didn’t actually claim they could sell that many. (The president of Alturdyne *is* a director of Freedom Motors, so there is an unquestioned connection here).
Other companies are real, but stated in their letters of intent that the engines had to be under a certain price. David has made clear on the blog that their current engine isn’t remotely low cost, so that excludes them. I can’t find any information about Madami International, which suggests that their 80,000 engines aren’t required.
However you slice it, it’s clear that most if not all of these potential orders don’t exist. This is even before considering the fact that anyone who wanted an engine seven to eleven years ago probably obtained one long ago from someone else.