SHOCKING, NOT: Another EV Maker Media Darling Goes Bankrupt
On one hand, you have Tesla, a company built on the back of government subsidies and loan programs that ultimately was able to evolve into a now-profitable company that is able to stand on its own feet without government subsidies.
On the other hand, you have #Nikola, just another of a growing number of EV makers who have gone bankrupt despite benefitting from billions of dollars of government assistance programs.
Somewhere, the ghost of Nikola Tesla is wishing all these tech people would quit abusing his name for their own purposes.
Nikola, a much-ballyhooed media darling maker of electric heavy trucks that were going to revolutionize the world of freight transportation, announced early Wednesday it has filed for #Chapter11 #bankruptcy protection, citing challenging macroeconomic and market conditions, i.e., nobody wanted to buy its trucks.
"Like other companies in the electric vehicle industry, we have faced various market and macroeconomic factors that have impacted our ability to operate," CEO Steve Girsky said in a statement.
Yes, nobody could’ve possibly seen difficult market or economic factors coming!
In other words, the company was founded on an unsustainable business model that has failed even in spite of having benefitted from billions of dollars of misallocated capital provided by U.S. taxpayers. Nikola’s only real hope for a longer life derived from federal mandates forcing the nation’s freight industry to adopt extreme high-cost #electrictrucks, and from continuous injections of new subsidy dollars that would enable the company to keep paying bills and servicing overwhelming debt loads.
Nikola is, in other words, just a typical American #EV startup whose founders made big bets on being able to feed from the government trough for years to come. Now that the Biden mandates are in the process of being ended by the Trump administration and no prospects exist for the enactment of future Orwellian debt-funded subsidy bills like the #InflationReductionAct, Nikola had to give up this rent-seeking ghost.
Here’s an?excerpt from a story at Bloomberg:
In recent years, the company has endured cash-flow issues, slow demand, executive turnover and a collapsing stock price. Nikola also recalled its battery-electric trucks after battery fires in 2023 prompted it to temporarily halt sales.
Nikola is the latest manufacturer to succumb to a punishing environment for EVs, which are struggling to maintain traction due to high costs, spotty charging infrastructure and lukewarm customer interest. Fisker Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June, while Canoo Inc. announced a Chapter 7 filing Jan. 17 — both companies, like Nikola, went public via blank-check reverse mergers during a wave of such listings in 2020. The Swedish battery maker Northvolt AB filed for bankruptcy protection in the US in November.
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Goodbye, Nikola, we hardly knew ye.
And good riddance.
That is all.