It’s tough to be a start-up in the car industry. It’s one thing to engineer a car ready for production, quite another to then put it into mass production, satisfy all kinds of legislation, manage sales channels and aftersales and generate public awareness.
No other product requires such careful cradle-to-grave management and burden as cars, and you have to do it for multiple models at the same time for wildly different global markets.
Tesla made a loss for 17 straight years before turning a profit in 2020 and is truly the anomaly for car-making start-ups achieving success; so many names have faded away (eg Faraday Future), others have got there but are struggling (eg Rivian) and Dyson got to the point of making a car, having spent billions to get it to production readiness, then pulled out anyway.
Then there’s Polestar.
