THE SPARROW STORY
Initial Sparrow Production in 1998
By 1998 the first Sparrows were in limited production. With cars finally reaching customers, the team turned to the next challenge: setting up dealerships and securing investors who could carry the Sparrow into higher volume.
From the Sparrow archive. Product plans, events and availability described here belong to the original historical period.
From hand-built cars to a company
Building a few prototypes and building a product line are very different tasks. The early production Sparrows were still largely hand crafted, and the company depended on investor funds to keep research and limited production going.
One archive photo from this period shows a Sparrow in San Francisco, parked near the ballpark then under construction, taken after the annual auto show. Around 300 Sparrows were eventually built between 1998 and 2003. The high-volume transition that would have made the venture profitable never came, but 1998 was the year the Sparrow stopped being an experiment and became a car people could own.