Auto start-ups in crisis: the long death

2023-07-15 13:52:44

There are many reasons why e-car start-ups fail, and in many cases they must also be considered individually in terms of their dynamics. Pascal Blum, on the other hand, has managed to establish the e-scooter brand Unu, a vehicle manufacturer newly founded in 2012, in the new energy sector in the long term. However, the attempt to bring a self-developed scooter model onto the market during the Corona period cost his company a lot of energy. Blum was also confronted with problems that also contributed to the failure of some start-ups in the automotive sector. In an interview in April 2023, Blum gave some of the reasons for their problems: “We saw for ourselves how expensive and time-consuming it is to develop vehicles ourselves. As a small company, you hardly have any advantages over a large provider. While start-ups in the software sector often have advantages because they are much more agile and can also develop much cheaper and faster, this is not the case at all in the automotive sector. There it is rather the case that as a small provider you have additional costs because you do not have the quantities. Or simply acts more slowly because certain suppliers deprioritize you, or certain complexities require a level of competence that can only be achieved with a team of several hundred people. The agility and cost advantage in vehicle development is zero for small companies.”