Fisker is at its last gasp. After burning through $1.4 billion, “the company is out of cash,” writes Reuters, “for months, key investors have been footing the car maker’s day-to-day expenses to keep it alive in diminished form.” Reuters has an in-depth report on what went wrong at Fisker. Reuters also has the one sentence version:
“Executives simply couldn’t orchestrate the complex dance that leads from a design sketch to the production and sale of a profitable car.”
Read the Reuters in-depth report by their Detroit reporters Deepa Seetharaman and Paul Lienert.
And if you want to know how Fisker even bungled a rescue by China’s Geely, a deal cut by Joel Ewanick, working as a consultant, then Reuters has another report for you. Read how Ewanick already had convinced Geely Chairman Li Shufu to put $250 million into Fisker, which would also have provided Geely with U.S. production for Volvo and Geely as part of the bargain. Read how wires were crossed with another team scouring China for money.
Should you ever think of putting money into a startup carmaker, read these reports first.
The links to the first Reuters story in the article are bad. Here is the working link: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/17/us-autos-fisker-specialreport-idUSBRE95G02L20130617
Thanks DC Bruce!
1. I can’t seem to read the article, neither via the link in the post, the link provided by DC Bruce, nor a search of “Fisker” on the Reuters site. It’ll show me the comments, some ads, but not the article.
2. Is that a correct figure for who much Ewanick had lined up from Geely? I would think it should be more like $250,000,000, as $250,000 would run Fisker for, what, a week?
Just tested my link. It’s still good. Alternate route: go to Reuters home page, then look under autos in the index that is displayed. You’ll see the title of the article.
Actually, I’d left the page open in another window and went back to it some time later. The text had magically appeared.
…and they’d brought in Detroit “pro” Tom LaSorda to get it done and still couldn’t get it done? Wow. Where was Henrik Fisker while this was going on – or was Henrik Fisker part of the problem?