The fortunes of China’s most outlandish EV company, HiPhi, have seemingly gone from bleak to dire with the announcement that parent company Human Horizons has filed for bankruptcy.
There had been renewed hope for the charismatic but flawed premium EV brand when iAuto Group signed a strategic cooperation agreement in May this year to rebuild the team and restart production, but doubts over the promised funds materialising seem to have reached a head.
The writing was seemingly on the wall back in February when the company suspended operations for six months and laid off most of its staff, but rumours quickly circulated of interest from state-owned giants Changan and FAW, owners of Hongqi, before talk of Saudi Arabian investment also surfaced.
Seemingly, no such heroic rescue has come to fruition and now the company’s only hope of survival is for a last-gasp reorganisation and urgent investment.
In accepting the application for pre-reorganisation, the court recognised the potential for restructuring, which gives Human Horizons a further six months, extendable by three, to protect the assets they have, maintain operations, and seek investors.
So while things look gloomy now, there is still a sliver of hope that the brand may yet survive. From our experience with the products, reviews of which you can view via the links below, there is great potential, just perhaps too much complexity in the products.
The first model, an outrageous gullwing/suicide-doored 6-seater SUV-cum-MPV, looked like nothing ever seen before but suffered from various glitches due to everything being electric, but it was imaginative, bold, and was for a time the best-selling model over 500,000RMB in China.
The equally outlandish Z sports GT followed but served rather more as a halo product than a meaningful sales leader, which led to the Y, a far more muted but still out-there mid-size SUV which, as a HiPhi leader told us at the Guangzhou Auto Show in early 2023, was destined for European sales.
It plugged a sales gap for a while but couldn’t stem the flow of losses, never achieving real mass-market sales. Undoubtedly China’s aggressive price war would not have helped, but the reality is that HiPhi perhaps flew a bit too high too fast.
Whether they can avoid going the way of brands like Enovate, Byton, and Weltmeister remains to be seen, but we’ll be hoping a knight in shining armour with very deep pockets comes along soon enough. The world still has room for a little crazy.
