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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: 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.