Simpsonville-based Star EV looks back on 20 years of building electric vehicles
While Simpsonville-based Star EV quietly celebrated its 20th anniversary this year, CEO Jane Zhang has kept most of her attention on a future she believes to be bright for the company.
Zhang co-founded Star EV in 2003 with husband Jun Hu, who can still be found on the floor of the manufacturing facility, inspecting the carts and people movers before they are shipped to dealers across the U.S. and internationally.
The company built golf carts and electric bicycles early on. The bicycle line was sold. The carts that were once designed primarily for golf courses have evolved into varying models of “personal transport vehicles” to meet the changing demands and tastes of a growing worldwide market.
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“There’s a great future for the EV business — for low-speed and high-speed vehicles,” Zhang said. “There’s huge potential in markets everywhere. There’s a lot of untapped territory globally and in the U.S. as well.”
Until recently, Star EV was the only manufacturer of its kind in South Carolina, even as other companies rushed into the market as demand for electric vehicles exploded.
Zeb Morton, marketing director at Star EV, said the company’s experience is paying dividends for consumers.
“A lot of people have jumped into specialty EVs that didn’t have the tools in place to support the business they were in,” Morton said. “Because we have evolved the way we have evolved, we have the tools in place. That’s allowed us to move into customizable and commercial vehicles. You won’t find another manufacturer that has all the things in place that we have.”
The company has recently started to offer customized — and fully loaded — vehicles, which can include digital displays and stereos for private vehicles, or a stretcher and IV stand for commercial medical vehicles.
Morton said Star EV is simply meeting the demands of both customers and dealers, some of whom would rather have custom work done at the manufacturing facility.
Over the next five years, the company plans to expand its footprint on Neely Ferry Road with a 75,000-square-foot expansion. It will house a new manufacturing facility for commercial vehicles that will be used by emergency personnel, resorts, hospitals, law enforcement and others. The expansion will also mean growing its workforce of about 140 people.
The commercial market is a major component of Star EV’s plans for the future, particularly internationally.
“The U.S. market is more focused on the private, personal-transport vehicles,” said Star EV International Manager Nadine MacGregor Jacobs. “Internationally, that’s not the case, but there are needs for commercial vehicles in those markets.”
In 2022, Star EV reported more than $16 million in sales, and Zhang said two decades of building a brand is paying off.
“We have a lot of credibility because of our longevity,” she said. “With our experience, Jun and I have learned how we want to run the company and how we don’t want to run the company. We’ve had ups and downs with the economy, the recession in 2008. Then, the rise of demand for EVs and then COVID, but we’re riding the big wave of the EVs and growing the business.”
While the market has met or exceeded the vision of its founders, Zhang said the culture created at Star EV has played a big role in the company’s success.
“We truly do so much collaboration every day. It’s truly teamwork and very important,” she said. “We’re here and working with each other. I think people are enjoying it, which is a lot of growth and collaboration and learning.”