SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Electric vehicle startup Nikola Corp. has announced it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy:
Nikola now joins a line of EV startups that fell into bankruptcy over the past year. While the Biden-Harris administration went full-speed ahead with a vision of EVs replacing gas-powered vehicles, electric-vehicle production has become a bad bet for the companies that jumped into the vision head-first. Consumers just never got on board with the plan.
With Trump planning to end federal EV mandates and legislation seeking to stop tax credits for the purchase of new EVs, the list of failed EV startups might continue to grow.
[...] The company went public in 2020, according to Bloomberg, through a deal with a special-purpose acquisition company. Nikola's stock went up after the transaction was closed, but shortly after, Bloomberg revealed its founder, Trevor Milton, had overstated the capability of the company's debut truck. He was later convicted on fraud charges.
"Like other companies in the electric vehicle industry, we have faced various market and macroeconomic factors that have impacted our ability to operate," Nikola president and CEO Steve Girsky said in a recent statement on the company's bankruptcy filing.
Previously:
- Nikola Stock Craters After Cancellation of Major Garbage Truck Order
- Nikola Stock Falls 14 Percent after CEO Downplays Badger Truck Plans
- Nikola's Deal With GM Was Supposed to Close Today—It Didn't
- Nikola Founder Bought Truck Designs From Third Party
- Nikola Stock Plunges 26% after Fraud Claims Complicate Hydrogen Plans
- New Report Claims Widespread Deception by Nikola Motor and Founder Trevor Milton
(Score: 2) by Undefined on Sunday February 23 2025, @04:11PM (9 children)
Then there's insurance, which for EV's seems to be steep, at least where I am. And registration. And for those with a home and more than minimal driving distances, higher level chargers than the typical garage outlet. And installation for same.
And one more thing... a large number of the people who can afford all this and wanted an EV have already bought one, if they were so inclined. So the remaining market... just those wealthy ones who are just now starting to look at a new vehicle.
I use a dedicated preprocessor to elaborate abbreviations.
Hover to reveal elaborations.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday February 23 2025, @05:38PM (3 children)
No one will sell a commuter vehicle. They're only willing to sell "shitty luxury vehicle but green" or "shitty construction dude vehicle but green" or "shitty techno-fetish vehicle but green" all with $50K batteries offering 600 miles of range of which I don't need about 550 of the miles.
I'd love to be able to buy a Yaris / Corolla but EV and 50 mile range would be about enough. Really, 25 miles would be enough for most days. Nobody will sell it because nobody will pay $75K for that. A fully enclosed golf cart with working HVAC that I can drive on the road is all I need for 95% of my travels, the other 5% we'll take the wife's giant vehicle or rent a moving truck or something.
Today, church, 3 miles round trip, and food store 1.5 miles round trip and probably the public library drop off 2 miles round trip.
Yesterday I was dad-taxi for 3 miles and 5 miles round trip.
Friday I hit the gym as always 2 miles round trip, dad-taxi for 4 miles round trip
Thursday was food store 2 miles round trip and Dad Taxi 40 miles round trip (long story). There was a charger in the parking lot at the destination so technically 20 miles each way would have been workable-ish. I could have taken my wife's car, trivially. She was doing mom-taxi work 3 miles round trip at the same time, just swap cars.
Wednesday was gym 2 miles, dad-taxi 4 miles.
It seems I'm out of the house and in my car about twice a day, but rarely more than single digits miles. There's a charger station about every half mile in my suburb. Fast chargers a block from my kid's martial arts dojo and my grocery store parking lot.
I want the utility of an EV, I'm not interested in the greenwashing, but nobody will sell a utility EV. I'd like something like a side-by-side utility vehicle but enclosed with HVAC and instead of $20K for gas tank I'd be willing to pay up to $25K for an EV utility vehicle, maybe. One problem is my commuter gas car base model costs $25K in 2025, so its hard to justify replacing it with a side-by-side instead of buying a more capable gas burner for about the same money, also my commuter car is street-legal unlike most side-by-sides.
Maybe the Chinese will, and they'll wipe the legacy automakers off the map, thats really our only hope.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 23 2025, @05:47PM
Take a look at used Nissan Leaf prices. If you are willing to pay to have one trucked in from CA you might be pleasantly surprised--there is a glut of them used, some with very low miles. Check prices on LA and SF area Craigslist, https://losangeles.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=nissan%20leaf#search=2~gallery~6 [craigslist.org]
(Score: 2) by ledow on Monday February 24 2025, @11:02AM
Quite.
I bought a brand new ICE car from Ford 10 years ago. EV were just far too expensive.
I'm now looking at what happens when that same car is too expensive to run, maintain or I just fancy a change. I've decided, 100%, categorically: EV.
But if I go on Ford's website for EVs... £40,000. That's TWICE what I paid for a car 10 years ago. And they are - as you say - "trucks" (I'm including SUV in that, I have no interest in them) and sportscars and there is no "basic" EV.
They even reinvented the long-dead "Capri" line of branding, which has a terrible reputation. And the Capri EV is... basically £40,000. For £46k you could have a Mustang EV.
Sorry, but inflation has NOT doubled prices in ten years, and EVs have actually weirdly got MORE expensive in that time.
I want an EV equivalent to my Mondeo (called Fusion in the US), or old Escort, or even a Sierra. A runaround car that isn't prohibitive and doesn't need to seat 8, but in which I can put my shopping and carry a couple of passengers. Something I can park without needing 40 cameras to see everything.
The hatchback type of car appears dead in EV terms from Ford, which is incredibly annoying, and they have nothing that even comes close to a year's average annual salary in the UK.
Many of the "big brands" are the same... it's basically forcing me down to the niche, foreign and cheaper brands, and even smaller cars, which is ridiculous. It should be the other way around, but Ford et al are still pushing all their mass production capabilities into ICE cars rather than EV, which is ridiculous with deadlines looming.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Monday February 24 2025, @10:50PM
My lease is going to be up in a couple of months, and I've been hoping for the mythical small EV pickup Ford Maverick sized but none exist. I like my RAV4s but I just need a less expensive vehicle, as this one I've been driving is nice but the insurance and tabs for it are ridiculous. Probably going to go for a Corolla hybrid with AWD, as the AWD is the main thing I want.
Well good luck with that, now that the Florida Orange Man is getting all tariff-happy and doing everything possible to crash the economy.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 5, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Sunday February 23 2025, @08:44PM (2 children)
Pricing isn't what killed Nikola; It was plain old fraud. They lied to investors about the maturity of their vehicles (0/5 finished and unable to move under their own power) and customer orders (related party transactions, not firm buy commitments), made deceptive advertising to attract more investment (the blister reel video of the truck "driving" was made by towing a non-functional vehicle to the top of a hill and letting it roll down by gravity), got caught by Hindenburg Research* **, and ran out of money when investors stopped coming back.
* https://hindenburgresearch.com/nikola/ [hindenburgresearch.com]
** https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021-267 [sec.gov] SEC: Nikola Corporation to Pay $125 Million to Resolve Fraud Charges
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2025, @12:35AM (1 child)
> and ran out of money when investors stopped coming back.
and ran out of money when the marks stopped coming back.
ftfy
I was pretty convinced that it was a scam from the start.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Monday February 24 2025, @03:59AM
The irony is that there is a market for electric heavy trucks. Edison Motors in Canada [edisonmotors.ca] is demonstrating that pretty clearly. They're building actual move-under-their-own-power-and-do-useful-work trucks on an infinitesimal fraction of Nikola's budget. They leapfrogged years of development and hundreds of millions of tooling cost by focusing on the powertrains first and putting that in existing "glider" (no engine or transmission) chassis. There's a big market for gliders already and they benefitted from that existing economy of scale instead of scratch building.
(Score: 2) by corey on Sunday February 23 2025, @08:57PM (1 child)
Meanwhile, the Chinese govt are subsidising the automakers there to the hilter. Here in Australia, each week it seems there’s a new Chinese automaker hitting our shores and the market is becoming flooded with Chinese EVs. Latest is Xpeng. All the Chinese EVs are competing hard on price and EV prices have been dropping.
Sad to hear about Nikola.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2025, @01:21AM
Seriously though, I thought lots of people (esp those from the US) believe that having the Government involved in stuff or throwing money at stuff makes things worse not better?
Meanwhile the DOGE is busy dismantling US gov and related stuff...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Sunday February 23 2025, @04:55PM (1 child)
I occasionally wondered if the name was a subtle troll, trying to get Tesla to buy them so the merged company would be named "Nikola Tesla"
We've reached the point in the system where its attracted the fraud-people, which I guess is unironically good? They don't show up in markets that are overly dead or have no money. EVs must be doing well if they're attracting the fraud demographic.
(Score: 2) by fraxinus-tree on Sunday February 23 2025, @05:40PM
The name is not a troll, it is a copycat.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Sunday February 23 2025, @07:00PM
Overstated, yeah. This business proclivity for exaggerating beyond the point where the claims can no longer be considered even slightly truthful has damaged the whole idea of EVs. I am also very skeptical of rooftop solar. When American businesses promote going green, they invariably push the ideas that profit them the most no matter how doubtful the benefits to the buyer.
So many of our current customs seem to have arisen from successful propagandistic advertising campaigns promoting really expensive solutions to trivial problems that have been blown way out of proportion, if they can be considered problems at all. For example, the idea that women should shave their legs that seems to have expanded to all body hair. Nice, for manufacturers of shaving products. Another example is the infamous extended warranty. One of the most irresponsible business strategies is to fan the flames of bigotry and fearmonger in order to increase sales of whatever products, such as guns, that can be made to seem useful for dealing with that "problem" that isn't a problem. That's the whole Military Industrial Complex for you.
Perhaps the smartest move for many people is real urban living instead of suburban sprawl, if you can find a space that doesn't cost a fortune to rent or own, and isn't a crime and decay riddled hellhole. Don't even have a car, use a bicycle or walk everywhere. And put technology to use, with telecommuting. Peddlers of cars, whether EV or not, don't want citizens to think of such ideas. But that "if" is a big if. One of the drivers (pun sort of intended) of the sprawl is the high cost of urban living space. Buying that home in the sticks has long been a strategy to fight back against high real estate prices. The car is a critical enabler of that strategy.
(Score: 2) by donkeyhotay on Sunday February 23 2025, @09:32PM (1 child)
This story is reminiscent of vaporware. Can we call it EVaporware? Another "fake it til you make it" failure.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Monday February 24 2025, @09:49AM
The trouble is that there are many people who will throw money blindly to buy shares in anything that has "green", "environmentally friendly". or "Recyclable" in its claims. It is a scammer's heaven, and can be self-fulfilling because the share price is pumped up by the more people wanting to buy after you did - until the bubble bursts.
This is happening with Tesla, which started off with excellent intentions (before Musk was involved) and a good product, but under Musk it has become a scheme to pump up its own share price, with periodic showbiz style presentations of vapourware and BS promises. Tesla has never paid a dividend to its shareholders and would not survive without government subsidies, yet its market cap is for the moment higher than that of several other much larger car makers added together.