THE SPARROW STORY
A Late-1990s Sparrow Photographed Outside the Unfinished AT&T Park in San Francisco
This archive image comes from one of Corbin's trips to the annual San Francisco Auto Show in the late 1990s. Once the show was over, the team drove the Sparrow around the city to gather photographs, and this frame was taken in front of the new AT&T Park, home of the Giants, while the ballpark was still under construction.
From the Sparrow archive. Product plans, events and availability described here belong to the original historical period.
Why the show trips mattered
The San Francisco Auto Show was a fixed point in the early Sparrow story. The Alpha prototype made its world debut there in 1996, two pre-production Beta cars followed in 1997, and by 1998 the first Sparrows were in limited production. Driving the car through city traffic afterwards was part of the routine, both to photograph it against recognisable landmarks and to see how a small three-wheeled electric car fitted into an ordinary urban setting.
The unfinished stadium in the background dates the picture to the same period as those early production years. Read today, the photo records two things under construction at once: a new ballpark and a small car company still trying to establish itself.