And in the end there were only two of them left. Like in the Agatha Christie mystery novel Ten Little Indiansa series of premature deaths is hitting the electric car sector. Los Angeles-based Fisker, founded in 2016 and listed on Wall Street four years later, wanted to challenge Tesla with its Ocean SUV: on June 18, it declared bankruptcy. The same fate a year ago for Lordstown Motors, an Ohio company that produced a zero-emission pick-up. California-based Proterra, specializing in electric buses, also ended up bankrupt. Oregon-based Arcimoto, which landed on the Nasdaq, was aiming for battery-powered and three-wheeled sports vehicles but had to raise the white flag, abandoning the stock market and its ambitions of success.
A massacre without borders: in the United Kingdom, the project to launch an electric van by Arrival, a London-based company that had reached a value of 13 billion dollars on the stock market, has collapsed. A sad list that could grow in the coming months. The stock of the manufacturer of non-polluting cars Nikola has suffered a 72 percent fall from the highs of five years ago. Lucid has seen its share price collapse from 55 dollars in 2021 to the current 2.9 dollars. Rivian has slipped from 130 dollars three years ago to 13 dollars.
And even Chinese companies are not doing much better: the stock of Xpeng, which was flying at 64 dollars four years ago, is now vegetating around 8 dollars, while Nio, which climbed up to 61 dollars in 2021, was worth ten times less in recent days.
There is no mystery, however, the causes of this crisis are evident. Too many companies have launched in the electric vehicle sector (there are about a hundred of them worldwide) and it is natural that many will not be able to sustain the investments and propose a successful product; furthermore, the profitability of zero-emission car manufacturers is still very low and only those who have reached a certain size are profitable: in the latest report by the consultancy firm Alixpartners we read that in China, where electric sells a lot, only two companies earned in 2023, Byd and Li Auto, while all the others were in the red; finally, demand, especially in the West, is growing less rapidly than expected and this represents a further problem.
Even Tesla, which is also profitable, had to suffer in the first quarter a slowdown in revenues of 8.6 percent and profits of 55 percent. And its stock has slipped from the heights of 350 dollars in 2021 to less than 250 dollars. In the end, Tesla will survive together with BYD, the last two Indians, and a few others.
