Advanced Transportation Merger with ZAP

NEW YORK, Aug. 22 While visiting customers in Manhattan, veteran automotive entrepreneur Steven Schneider laid out plans for ZAP and its recent reorganization and merger with his Company, Voltage Vehicles, which he founded three years ago to market advanced transportation.

ZAP finalized mergers on July 1 with Voltage Vehicles and RAP Group, Inc. two privately owned Northern California companies involved in automotive marketing and distribution. Schneider says he looks forward to taking a leadership role in ZAP, the Company that helped pioneer the consumer market for electric bicycles and scooters in 1994.

"I think it important to note to the public as well as to the customers and shareholders of ZAP of the significant changes that have taken place," said Schneider. "This is a completely new Company with new products, new marketing, new management, new strategic alliances and even a new Board of Directors. While the transition is ongoing, more than ever I want to assure everyone of the new spirit in which we will be moving forward."

Schneider, 42, founded Voltage Vehicles as a distribution company specializing in advanced transportation. For the past five years, Schneider has dedicated his career to bringing alternative fuel vehicles to mainstream America, conducting independent research through site visits to advanced transportation manufacturers and research institutions throughout the country. Schneider has recruited lending institutions to support financing for consumers of electric vehicles. He holds an advisory position to the Electric Vehicle Association of the Americas as well as Board of Director positions with ZAP and other advanced transportation and energy companies.

For the past two years Schneider has been test marketing ZAP products through the independent auto dealer market. He says that the positive response from auto dealers for the ZAP products was a chief consideration in his reasons for merging with ZAP. Schneider is also assisting in ZAP's business development, which in the past weeks includes a new strategic alliance with GEM, a DaimlerChrysler Company, to rent its neighborhood electric car, as well as advanced transportation developer Daka Development for its new electric water scooters and other products.

"This is an exciting time in advanced transportation with many innovative products and companies emerging. With ZAP, we hope to take the lead in licensing the marketing and distribution of these vehicles through a new strategy that targets independent auto dealers. ZAP is an internationally known brand that helped spark the market with its electric bicycles and scooter products, but we hope to focus more on creating relationships with many of the new manufacturers now getting involved in advanced transportation, to assist in creating markets for these new products."

"In this era of increasing concern for corporate responsibility, I would also like to reaffirm a commitment on behalf of the entire management of ZAP that profitability will be our chief concern. While this is a new company, we are still holding to the principle of 'Zero Air Pollution,' or ZAP - vehicles powered by renewable energy. But, a business with a vision of the future like ZAP, without fiscal responsibility, cannot exist."