Written by Cláudio Afonso | LinkedIn | X
Texas-based electric vehicle startup Canoo filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and ceased operations last Friday seeing its shares plunging to just 25 cents on the following trading day.
YT Jia, the founder of the struggling EV maker Faraday Future, shared a video on X this Saturday, commenting on Canoo‘s bankruptcy and the controversy between both companies over the last seven years.
Just like Canoo, Faraday Future has also delivered only a handful of vehicles over the last 18 months.
In the video, Jia accused the Canoo’s founding team of stealing concepts, strategies, and other ‘relevant materials’ when departing from Faraday Future.
The executive started the video by saying that Faraday’s success in 2017 “drew interest from the wrong people” adding that Canoo’s founding team “were still executives at FF” when creating a new EV maker.
“Later that year, while still employed, they began secretly plotting their departure,” Jia stated. “When they eventually left, they took with them an extensive amount of FF’s product data, technical files, strategies, concepts, and even critical financing networks and relevant materials.”
Faraday’s founder claimed that the executives “emptied out” Faraday adding that it pushed the company “into its second major crisis.”
“Even though we took legal action later, the damage was done, and it left us struggling to move forward for a while,” he stated.
“As entrepreneurs, being betrayed and backstabbed by former teammates undermined by a backdoor play in the U.S., where intellectual property is generally so well protected, was one of our toughest pains,” YT Jia added.
The executive said Canoo’s ending “seemed inevitable from the start,” adding later that the company’s foundation “was built on stealing intellectual property and technological achievements from others, which set the company up with fundamentally ‘flawed DNA.'”
YT Jia claimed that Canoo’s founders were not “entrepreneurs” who were “focused on shortcuts and quick wins.”
“The founders of Canoo came from backgrounds as professional managers, not entrepreneurs. As a result, their sense of mission was weak. They were focused on shortcuts and quick wins,” he stated.
Despite saying that Canoo’s executives were not “willing to make sacrifices or stick it out for the company’s survival,” Jia admitted that the startup “had certain competitive edge in its products and technology.”
Faraday’s founder named “futuristic symmetrical design, exceptional space-optimised interiors, next-generation innovative architecture and a comparably advanced skateboard chassis” as Canoo’s highlights.
As its final effort, Canoo’s management tried over the last weeks to secure “financial support” from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (“DOE”) Loan Program Office. However, it was “unfortunately unable,” the company said in last week’s statement.
