VentureBeat

Santa Rosa, Calif. company Zap, a company that has gone through bankruptcy once already, is asking for $25,000 deposits on its electric car that has yet to be built.

The company is making all kinds of promises (first reported by Forbes and picked up by a Wired blog) that seem too good to be true:

It will recharge in 10 minutes and travel 350 miles on that charge. It will go zero to 60 mph in 4.8 seconds and carries seven passengers. The windows are made out of photovoltaic glass that turns sunlight into horsepower. ZAP stands for Zero Air Pollution, quite an impressive name for a car. More details here.

Of course, there is no vehicle that remotely approaches this sort of dream car.

Be wary of hype. Clean-tech is hot, and making wild promises without actually achieving the results in the lab is enticing because it helps you get attention, and possibly money. Steorn has been making claims about making “free energy,” and saying it wanted scientific approval before raising money, but it looks really flimsy so far.

That said, some publications are taking Zap seriously (see Inside Greentech). It is publicly traded, over the counter (ZAAP), and here’s the management team. Any experts out there have any thoughts on this?

Anyway, it’s a reminder that industry bubbles can cause unbridled optimism. Check out this story over the weekend in the St. Petersburg Times about Brent Kovar, who said he had breakthrough satellite communications technology, raised $21 million from his wife’s relatives and many others, but it was a scam. He took people for a ride for an entire decade.