Andrea Rossi has stated that the E-Cat SKLed will only be manufactured and sold after 1 million pre-orders have been received by Leonardo Corporation. This seems like a pretty high bar to achieve, but Rossi has said that it is necessary to be able to sell them for $25 a piece. He believes a low price is necessary to take away the incentive for people to try to reverse engineer the lamps and sell knock-offs.
Here’s a comment on the subject that was posted by Nixter here on ECW a few days ago that I thought brought up some very interesting points:
I think the minimum pre-orders of one million units is achievable if done correctly, meaning a few test units given to well-known electronics channels of popular internet influencers for reviews, you can bet that immediate claims of fraud would ensue, generating immediate interest. If the units can pass basic electrical tests done properly by an established YouTube Vlogger, huge amounts of free press might be generated as the seemingly “Impossible claims” are verified. If you haven’t been following the E-Cat, the sudden appearance of this technology will look like complete fraud to the average person, to legitimize the claims this step would open the door enough to get the ball rolling.
The significance of this development is that Dr. Rossi is now willing to risk having his technology reverse engineered for a specific return of investment. This marks a turning point where the doctor is ready to expose his Intellectual Property to the general public, where the units will immediately be opened and examined by entities wishing to copy the IP.
This leads me to believe that Dr. Rossi’ latest collaboration partners are indeed making progress to the point where the doctor feels it safe to release much older versions of his invention for use in devices for sale in the marketplace The premise being that his latest generation of the device is so far advanced that it will certainly succeed in functionality and marketability.
The gap between the SKLed lights older technology and his latest iterations must be enormous for the doctor to risk selling it openly. I am curious as to the identity of his latest partner(s) and how they will be able to leverage this new technology to grab a market share, the partners must have some sort of exclusivity contract that gives them rights to use, market, and sell the technology. Right now we don’t have any significant evidence that any of these claims are legitimate, this will change when real world hardware is put into the hands of the free market.
Between now and November I would imagine that there will be only a trickle of pre-orders from people who have been following the E-Cat story over the years. That number I estimate to be only in the region of possibly low ten thousands.
I think there is a chance that the November presentation could boost that interest quite a bit, especially if it is well executed and the demonstration of the product in convincing. As Nixter states above, for the E-Cat SKLed to go viral, and get to a million pre-orders, I think it will need to be picked up by a new audience, and influential vloggers and influencers online could play an important role in doing that. Andrea Rossi might be wise to place some pre-production prototypes in the hands of some of these persons.
One other possibility is that the right large business or industrial sector could be convinced enough by the presentation that they place enough pre-orders to reach the million mark quite quickly.