Fresco Motors, Norway’s first electric automaker, is taking reservations for a nonexistent car, and offers employees free ‘treats/fruits’ when they’re ‘peckish’

Fresco Motors, a Norwegian startup company so new that all of the posts on the news section of their website are dated July 28 of this year, doesn’t have a car to sell you yet. But the company has big ambitions.

They want to become what one might call the Tesla of Norway, a nation that, while it’s known for having the world’s highest penetration of electric vehicles, does not yet manufacture them domestically.

Visit the Fresco Motors website, and you’ll get a look at what is admitted to be a computer-generated image of the Fresco Reverie, the vehicle the company hopes to release as their debut model.

While the design isn’t earth-shattering, it exhibits some mildly interesting, though rather derivative, aesthetic choices. The front end looks decisively Tesla-ish. In the back, the lines are more reminiscent of the current-generation Dodge Charger.

If you’re interested in following an electric-vehicle startup from the ground floor, Fresco presents a great opportunity. According to Electrek, they have yet to even create a prototype.

Yet they are already taking reservations on the Reverie. It doesn’t cost any money to reserve a Reverie, and the company promises that, if you make a reservation, you won’t be obligated to purchase one.

That’s reassuring.

The “vaporware” concept—generating advance hype and even sales for products that don’t yet exist—is of course nothing new. It’s commonplace in the technology industry. One can also make a case that it’s been part of Tesla’s practices as well, given the amount of time many of their customers who ordered the Model 3 had to wait for the company to start delivering.

And, famously, selling cars under a shadow of high uncertainty about whether they will ever actually be built was a big part of the downfall of Tucker Corporation, an automaker founded in the 1940s by the eccentric serial entrepreneur Preston Tucker. The company failed in 1950 after a wave of controversy and an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission surrounding questions about whether they would ever begin delivering the futuristic cars they had prototyped and heavily promoted.   

The way that Fresco as of this writing is presenting career opportunities on their website isn’t helping much in terms of circumventing the vaporware vibe.

Fresco Motors does currently report that they have nine employees, and their homepage features a prominent “We’re Hiring” teaser. However, the Apply Today link takes you to a recruitment page on a third-party website that, as of today, states that “There are currently no open positions at Fresco Motors.

Fresco Motors does, however, promise some attractive perks to employees, including a free catered lunch daily, free coffee and tea, and free soft drinks and “treats/fruits” for those feeling “peckish after lunch.”

Wow.

Sounds like a great place to work, if that bothersome “no open positions” obstacle should ever go away.

What’s not to love about a free catered lunch every day?

Granted, free coffee and tea isn’t exactly a workplace rarity. But free treats/fruits when I’m peckish?

Heck yeah. Count me in.

And let me know when you have a prototype of the Fresco Reverie ready.