EV maker Canoo, once worth $2.4B, files for bankruptcy

&quot;Calif.-founded EV maker Canoo, once worth $2.4 billion, goes belly-up after moving to Texas&quot;<p>Full title. Another L for the SPAC era.

I&#x27;ve driven one.<p>Amazingly, they are one of the very few automotive folks that actually said &quot;yes, sure&quot; when I ask my requisite &quot;can i drift it?&quot; Unfortunately, I was driving it inside a building that was to be one of their future factories, and declined to actually do so for safety reasons.

&gt; looked like an eraser on wheels<p>Have they seen any vehicle newer than, I dunno... 2010? Everything is a nondescript blob car these days.

As a meta question, at this point, what is the value add that these startups are trying to do? It seems like a ton of them fail to make a viable base platform profitable and able to mass produce. Is there a market for a white-label EV platforms that are proven able to be executed well on a production line and allow the startups to actually complete on the fit and finish bits?<p>Or is the base platform the actual value that they&#x27;re trying to execute on and failing?

It was ~2005-ish, I was just out of highschool, I saw a short documentary talking about a (different) electric car company working on revolutionary electric vehicles that had their working components in the form of a &quot;skateboard&quot; with changable chassis on top. It&#x27;s been decades now, I don&#x27;t know what happened to them.<p>It was 2017, Canoo was founded, I actually bought some stock in them. A &quot;little bird on my shoulder&quot; told me to get out of that mess. Glad I did.<p>Moral of the story for car startups with pipe dreams. Release SOMETHING as quickly as possible, get money flowing as quickly as possible. Even if it&#x27;s not a car, JESUS CHRIST make electric scooters FIRST and then move up slowly towards gold carts, then motorcycles, then eventually Electric Cars. Whatever you do, DO NOT spend decades without releasing a single product.

Shame, I thought they had great potential.

Guess that CAN-oo was more of a CAN’T-oo

They did a really nice job on the paint, though. Their car is very shiny.

Sad. If nothing else they were insanely aesthetic.

the good news is most of their good engineers had already gone to vw rivian and other companies in LA.<p>sad, but it shows the need for great leadership.<p>bad idea: moving to texas<p>bad idea: lack of focus. build ONE vehicle<p>investors have soured on EV capital, shortsighted pivot to AI, even though the industry will boom once we have another energy crisis and another boom in nuclear and renewables in 5-15 years.<p>somewhat related, the xpeng helicopter thing at CES was an exact rip off of the quirky canoo light bar design, so maybe the ethos of this car will live in a Chinese copy.