Nagoya Institute of Technology
August 27, 2009, 3:26 pm
Is Think Still a Norwegian Car Company?
By TODD WOODY
Th!nk The electric car maker emerged from bankruptcy protection. But is it still a Norwegian enterprise?
The Norwegian electric car maker Think is back on the road.
The company on Thursday said it had exited bankruptcy protection and secured $47 million in new financing to restart production of the Think City, a highway-capable urban runabout with a range of about 112 miles.
Think had shut down its assembly line outside of Oslo late last year when the global financial crisis cut off access to new capital.
But is Think still a Norwegian automaker? The company did get some local street cred Thursday: among its new shareholders is Investinor, an investment fund backed by the Norwegian government.
Still, in another sign of the globalization of the nascent electric car industry, the Think City will now be made in Finland at the plant of one of its new investors, Valmet Automotive. (Valmet assembles the Porsche Boxster and Cayman and will begin producing the Fisker Karma plug-in hybrid electric sports sedan.)
Think’s Norwegian assembly facility will be shuttered and its 85 employees dismissed.
An existing investor, the American company Ener1, which owns the lithium-ion battery maker EnerDel, now becomes Think’s largest shareholder with 31 percent of the company. EnerDel supplies batteries to Think, and in July, the two companies began a joint venture to sell electric car drivetrains.
Other Think investors include General Electric and the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
The company’s primary market is Europe, but Think plans to build a factory in the United States and has applied for an Energy Department loan guarantee to finance the project.
Think, which was formerly owned by Ford, took pains Thursday to emphasize its Norwegian roots. “Think, however, remains a truly Norwegian company, with its senior management, sales, marketing, design and engineering staff still located at the company’s Oslo headquarters,” the company said in a statement.
Think’s chief executive, Richard Canny, born in Australian, added, “This means we can restart production of the Think City as soon as possible.”
Electric Carmaker Think Files For Bankruptcy – Again
Jun. 24 2011 - 12:49 pm | 1,677 views | 0 recommendations | 1 comment
By TODD WOODY
It looks like the end of a long and winding road for Think, the pioneering Norwegian electric carmaker.
On Wednesday, the Oslo-based company filed for bankruptcy protection in Norway and a court-appointed trustee assumed control of Think’s business, according to Debra Salem, a spokeswoman for its U.S. subsidiary.
“Think filed for bankruptcy after failing to attract adequate capital to continue funding operations,” Salem said in an email. “The bankruptcy process does not include Think North America, which is a separate legal entity. The trustee will determine the future disposition of Think North America’s assets.
This is the third – and likely the last – trip to bankruptcy court for Think since its founding in the early 1990s. (Battery maker Ener1, Think’s largest shareholder, stated in a regulatory filing that it expected to take a $35.4 million charge.)
Think was a company ahead of its time in the late ‘90s when it made a plastic-bodied, battery-powered urban runabout called the City that it sold in Europe and leased in the San Francisco Bay Area. (Among its customers was a Stanford graduate student named Sergey Brin.) Ford had acquired a majority stake in Think and pumped $100 million into the development of the City to help it meet California’s zero-emission regulations. But anyone who has seen “Who Killed the Electric Car?” knows what came next when California abandoned its electric vehicle mandate.
Ford wrote off its investment and Think filed for bankruptcy. Then in late 2006 an affable white-haired Oslo entrepreneur and professor named Jan-Olaf Willums put together a group of investors and brought Think out of bankruptcy.
In early 2007, long before the Chevrolet Volt and Nissan Leaf, I heard Willums speak at a green tech conference in San Francisco where he laid out a plan to upend a century-old automotive paradigm, changing the way cars are made, marketed, sold, owned and driven.
A few months later I flew to Oslo to see this incipient revolution for myself. Willums had raised $78 million from European investors and Silicon Valley venture capitalists captivated by his vision of the electric car as an Internet-enabled iMac on wheels. (General Electric would also become an investor in Think.)
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