High profiles may prove salvation of the rolling dead

Like a scene from Frankenstein's lab, Better Place, Fisker, Aptera and Saab are set for a new lease on life

The revival of Detroit Electric proved one thing: the value of a concerted marketing campaign.

Even after the death of the associated operation and its product, a well-built brand can live on, even after years on ice.

Amid the tumult heralding the beginnings of the auto industry’s slow shift away from oil, names aplenty are being dispatched to history, some after just a couple of years. But a number are being rescued from purgatory, proving there’s something in a name.

Here’s what’s happening among the rolling dead...

There might yet be a place for Better Place

Just a fortnight after the sun set on ambitious Israeli battery and infrastructure specialist Better Place, the Jerusalem Post reported it may yet find salvation in the wallet of Yosef Abramowitz, the businessman-activist behind the country’s first wide-scale commercial solar power venture.

Through his Arava Power Company, Abramowitz – nicknamed “Captain Sunshine” and dubbed one of most important “green pioneers” in the world by CNN – set up Israel’s first on-grid, 4.95-megawatt solar field in 2011. His investment firm, Energiya Global Capital, and its partners are now expanding the technology into developing nations across the world.

Alluding on his Facebook wall to an offer he’d submitted to the company’s liquidators to assume its assets, he said saving Better Place is as much a patriotic issue as it is economic. It’s “in the interest of making sure Start Up Nation is not stalled by the current failure of Better Place” that “we must support the current and future drivers of electric vehicles in Israel.”

While he and his partners work on their due diligence, he’s looking for assurances from government that he’ll have its support. “I need to get an indication from the government that they are willing to put in place certain basic benefits to show they want to encourage electric car use in the State of Israel,” he told the Post.

He also wants clear evidence from Better Place’s existing customers that they’re behind him. “It would be for green Zionist reasons and it would be on behalf of current owners of the cars and hopefully future ones. Without them I would drop out of considering it.”

If it comes off, it could fit neatly with his current investments in renewables. “If I’m going to be involved with the future electric car in [the] State of Israel, you can bet that renewable energy is going to be part of [the] equation, and maybe ultimately the solution to a big part of the charging,” he said.

Competing suitors for Fisker

Fisker Automotive, the company behind the glamorous but troubled Karma PHEV, is faced with a stark choice: repay the US Department of Energy $US171 million or face bankruptcy. The debt hails from loans dating back to 2009, as part of a program to get promising low- and zero-emission startups on the road.

After a tumultuous 2012 that saw founding CEO Henrik Fisker first move aside to chairman, and then depart entirely, with two more CEOs installed in six months, the company has spent the first half of 2013 teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.

Now, Automotive News reports the firm has at least two possible saviours vying for it. Henrik Fisker, who left the company in March, is in talks with Pacific Century Group, Hong Kong billionaire Richard Li’s investment vehicle, about effectively buying the DoE’s debt to save it from liquidation. Li’s group is talking sums of $US25-30 million – a figure likely to work out in the order of 17 cents in the dollar on the DoE’s original investment.

Also interested is a group including Bob Lutz, the former GM executive widely credited with realising the Volt PHEV. Reuters has reported the Lutz group is proffering $20 million for Fisker Automotive.

Lutz’s company, VL Productions, gained wide publicity earlier this year pulling the wraps off the Destino – a Fisker Karma body with a 6.2-litre Chevrolet Corvette engine in place of the original’s electric drive motors and range extender engine. With the last Karma made to date emerging from Fisker’s Finnish outsource factory in mid-2012, VL has been struggling to get hold of residual body stock to service its own order book.

All are now sorting through the legal ramifications of assuming Fisker’s debt and assessing its viability, given the loan’s separate status from the rest of Fisker Automotive’s list of creditors. Whatever happens, it’s likely to be at considerable taxpayer expense.

US EV specialist Aptera draws new breath and divides between US and China

From the same week comes news that the stillborn Aptera, one of EV-world’s more radical names declared dead at the end of 2011, might yet find dual reincarnation on home turf and in China.

Aptera Motors drew loads of media attention for its futuristic two-seat enclosed trike. Pictures emerged in 2008 of something looking like a wingless light aircraft, with announcements that it would go to market in EV (2e) and series hybrid (2h) variants.

By 2010, although it was taking deposits, trouble was brewing with missed deadlines, restructure announcements and new projects put on hold. By the second half of 2011, Aptera was returning deposits and refusing to take any more. By year’s end, it was in liquidation.

Early in June this year, following months of rumours, a company called Zaptera USA announced it would rehabilitate the electric 2e. Bankrolled by Chinese investment group Jonway, Zaptera’s car will be built in China.

To keep patriots and conservatives interested on the home front, it announced an independent spinoff calling itself Aptera USA will market a Californian hand-built petrol-engined version, the 2g, in parallel.

Going to some lengths to distance their brand from Jonway’s Chinese counterpart, former Zaptera execs now at the helm of the new US operation have told media of plans to follow the 2g with similar US-made 2e and 2h variants.

No one is yet talking specs for the 2g beyond the high-excitement vapourware talk of “aerodynamic design”, “lightweight composite construction” and “over 100mpg” (2.35 L/100km).

Spyker fights to pull Saab from GM’s icebox

Then there’s Saab – the subject of bad news for Spyker, the Dutch specialist sports car builder that bought the eccentric Swede from General Motors in the hope of exhuming it from bankruptcy. Last week, a US court severely dented Spyker’s chances.

After numerous attempts by owner General Motors to resuscitate its flagging fortunes through the latter 2000s, it went belly-up under Spyker’s direction in 2011. But by mid-2012, rumours were strengthening about its reincarnation as an EV specialist.

In June 2012, an outfit called National Electric Vehicle Sweden, bankrolled by a consortium of Chinese and Japanese investors, announced concrete plans to relaunch the brand as an EV maker. When NEVS failed to raise the funds in time, Spyker intensified its talks about a joint venture with Chinese auto maker Youngman. The idea was to spin a $US250K “super sports utility vehicle” off the PhoeniX concept (pictured), developed under GM stewardship and shown in 2011.

The primary hindrance to their efforts has been GM. While it sold Spyker the Saab Automobile AB holding company, its powertrain and tooling subsidiaries and its Trollhättan factory, the Detroit giant kept the auto parts division, including all the DNA developed during its decade of full ownership. That gives it a great deal of continuing sway over Saab’s fortunes.

GM kyboshed the deal. Spyker took it to court, and last week a US federal judge dismissed the Dutch company’s $US3 billion lawsuit, saying GM had the right to block the sale of its own technology.

The saga will continue for some time yet. Spyker, not yet delivered of the judge’s decision in all its detail, has not yet announced whether it will appeal the decision. It’s not likely Spyker and Youngman will walk away, given the enforcement of GM’s power of veto leaves them poring over something so costly and useless. The next logical step is to find ways of disengaging the brand from anything and everything GM.

Given the inherent expense there, the two will be weighing up the true value of building a whole new car company around a brand.

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High profiles may prove salvation of the rolling dead

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