"Burned" 17 billion but not sold a car, "Chinese Tesla" went to death
If heaven wants its demise, it must first make it crazy, and the new force of building a new force Singularity Car is a good example.
In early July, some media reported that Singularity Automobile, a new automaker, was exposed to be in arrears of employees' wages, and the longest time has been one and a half years, and more than 150 employees have been executing arbitration.
In 2014, Singularity Automobile was established, it was established in the same year as Xpeng and NIO, four months earlier than Ideal Auto, is the earliest batch of new forces in car manufacturing, the founder is Shen Haiyin, who is also famous in the Internet field, he was the vice president of 360, the vice president of Kingsoft Software, he devoted himself to the car industry out of love for cars, in his words, "Singularity Automobile is my fourth entrepreneurship, the reputation of the first half of my life has been built to the second half of my life, must build a good car." ”
Since its establishment in 2015, Singularity Auto has experienced six rounds of financing, including angel round, ABC round and strategic investment, including Qihoo 360, Lenovo Star, Taoyun Capital, and Anhui Tongling Municipal Government, with a total financing of more than 17 billion yuan. It stands to reason that 17 billion yuan is enough to complete the mass production and listing of a car, you know, NIO ideal Xiaopeng, when raising 12 billion yuan, has completed the mass production and listing, but Singularity Automobile has not even built a mass-produced car, where is the 17 billion yuan spent on Singularity Auto?
Because Shen Haiyin, the founder of Singularity Automobile, took a very crazy step, he had to start with software and build his own factory.
The slogan of Singularity Auto is to build China's Tesla with Xiaomi's model. As we all know, Xiaomi starts with the mobile phone system, Singularity Auto founder Shen Haiyin believes that Tesla's core competitiveness is in the intelligent car machine and automatic driving system, so Singularity Auto and Horizon Robot cooperate to develop ADAS systems, cooperate with SHARP and other enterprises in human-computer interaction design, and develop voice interaction systems with Technology.
Singularity Motors even ambitiously announced that it will achieve autonomous driving on highways in 2017 and autonomous driving in cities by 2018. But Singularity cars, but did not think that there are mass-produced cars to have a platform with a system, otherwise, the on-board system is just a castle in the air. Singularity Auto did not expect that today, in 2022, high-speed automatic driving is still out of reach.
Not only to develop its own on-board system, Singularity Auto also looks down on the foundry model, to build its own factory, Singularity to build production bases in Tongling, Suzhou and Zhuzhou, with an investment of nearly 30 billion yuan. Before 2018, Singularity also completed the construction of R&D centers in Beijing, Shanghai, Tongling, Anhui, Silicon Valley in the United States, Utsunomiya in Japan and other places, plus the later Suzhou Global R&D Center, forming a R&D layout of "three countries and six places" in the world. However, the amount of money spent on building a self-owned factory is too large, and even if it is financed 17 billion yuan, it is difficult to support.
In April 2017, 3 years after the founding of Singularity Automobile, the preview version of Singularity iS6 was officially unveiled, which was even earlier than NIO ES8. However, this car can not be mass-produced, singularity iS6 has announced that it will be mass-produced and delivered at the end of 2018, 2019 Spring Festival, and the end of 2019, but all bounced tickets, so the 8-year-old singularity car is still stuck in the PPT stage, and Wei Xiaoli, who is in the same period, has several models mass-produced and listed.
There is no car to sell, research and development requires a lot of capital investment, self-built factories need a lot of money, just like that, Singularity Auto burned out 17 billion funds, originally held a good hand, just because of the founder's crazy and unrealistic ideas, and finally played sparsely.
Although the official account of Singularity Automobile still "fraudulently corpse" from time to time, but discerning people know that Singularity Car has no possibility of turning over, Singularity Motor's technology is still stuck in 2017, but the changes in the new energy vehicle market have turned the world upside down, Singularity Car is a bottomless pit, even if it is saved, it is not of much value. But who should go to for the financing that comes from government money, which originally came from taxpayers?