“Whether the tarnished company could have turned things around if interest rates hadn’t shot up and if EV take-up in the US had been as fulsome as had been predicted is for business students to weigh up in time, but with many of its pandemic cohort such as Lordstown Motors also hitting the skids it’s clear it would have been a difficult job to do.
As for the long game in the EV battle, Ms Hewson notes that Nikola’s IP “could present an opportunity” in the future, for the work done so far particularly in the hydrogen trucks sphere.
There are so many factors at play here it’s impossible to pick out the one most to blame, but along with the EV market not growing as strongly as hoped, Nikola had its own internal issues.
Talk of billions of dollars worth of orders and expectation fuelled mega hype that this EV maker could challenge Tesla and others; instead it has lost 99.7 per cent of share price value over the past year.
The sheer scale of those long, winding highways means building the infrastructure needed to facilitate a large-scale EV revolution will be a hugely expensive task, and one that will require businesses and politicians to share in the determination to get the job done.”.
