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Swedish car start-up passed off rebadged Chinese EV as its new ‘model Zero’

Last summer, Swedish car start-up UNITI showed its long-awaited new model ZERO car to investors. But it had simply imported a cheap Zhidou D3 electric car from China resprayed it, and added a new bumper, claims a devastating new investigation by Sweden's Filter Magazine.

Swedish car start-up passed off rebadged Chinese EV as its new 'model Zero'
Uniti founder Lewis Horne inside the prototype for the Uniti One in 2017. The car was an empty shell. Photo: Johan Nilsson/TT

The Lund-based start-up launched in 2017 with a wave of hype, raising some €1.1m in a crowd-funding campaign, forming partnerships with blue-chip companies like Siemens, E.on, and the German industrial robot giant Kuka, and winning plaudits from top politicians such as Sweden’s then environment minister, Isabella Lovin. 

“In Sweden, we are reinventing a piece of the world: the electric car,” the company’s charismatic Australian founder Lewis Horne gushed. “We have optimised the machine for its Achilles heel, which of course is the battery.”

The company claimed in 2017 to have developed an “innovation management system”, which had led to seven patent applications, with more on the way, and it quickly drew up plans to set up a fully automated factory in Landskrona. 

The scale of the company’s ambitions generated enormous media coverage, and soon Horne was crossing the globe, speaking at forum after forum. Even The Local was swept up in the excitement, asking in our headline whether Uniti had just crowdfunded the car of the future

But the factory in Landskrona never happened. Next, Horne began pledging that in 2020 Uniti would produce 300,000 cars at Silverstone in the UK. Two years later, not one functioning car has been produced. 

Finally, last summer, the first of the company’s long-suffering investors got to test drive a functioning car, the UNITI Zero. It looked nothing like the futuristic UNITI One prototypes, which had been shown a few years earlier: no streamlined design, no glass roof with in-built solar panel. “Is this just a rebadged Chinese car?” asked one sceptical investor.

Lewis Horne announces the Uniti Zero at an online meeting with investors last spring. The car was in fact a Zhidou D3. Photo: Screen Grab/Filter

“It’s going to be a real Uniti,” Horne responded. “Of course, it is built on a platform. Volvo and Polestar are built in the same place by the same people. But we are providing the quality, design, software, and technical solutions.” 

But according to the long investigation in Filter Magazine, it was a Zhidou D3, a low-cost Chinese electric vehicle that cannot even be legally taken on the roads in Sweden. All Uniti had done was spray it silver and change the design of the bumper.  

In November, the car site Bytbil was leaked accounts showing that the company had -9.4m kronor in its “own capital” account, and that Sweden’s national debt collection agency was trying to recover 7m kronor in debt. It then reported a 17.5m kronor loss, after which its external auditor resigned, expressing doubts about the company’s viability. 

A month later, on December 1st, Horne sent out a mail to shareholders saying that hoped-for investment by a major Chinese company was on the way but had been held up by new currency controls. He then asked for them to stump up a further 10m kronor so it could meet debts due on December 10th. 

It wasn’t until January 4th, that the company put out a release saying no Chinese investment was now coming. A board meeting, it said, was planned for the next week. 

Since then, there’s been silence. Horne, meanwhile, is residing on a sailing boat in the Caribbean after a four-month
sailing trip from Sweden.

Several former executives at the company told Filter that they had long ago lost faith in Horne. “Lewis could sell you a pencil for a million dollars,” a former head of PR, told the magazine.

Another former manager went further: “He thinks he is Elon Musk, but he is just a fraudster. He doesn’t have a clue about cars.”

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India among top investment destinations for Swedish companies

Saudi Arabia, the UAE and India are the top investment destinations for Swedish companies, meaning that businesses are planning on increasing their investments in these markets over the next 12 months.

India among top investment destinations for Swedish companies

“The stars are aligned for India. They have got a lot of internal investment programmes started, have acquired internal stability and managed to navigate the geopolitical situation in such a way that no one has any doubts any longer,” said Business Sweden CEO Jan Larsson.

Swedish businesses are in general less optimistic than last year about the global business scene, due to a struggling European economy and escalating trade wars between the US and China, according to a new Global Business Climate Survey 2024 by Business Sweden.

Despite this, many of the 24 countries in the report maintained a generally positive outlook, with scores over 3 on a 5-point scale, where 1 equals very poor and 5 very good. 

Overall, just six percent of respondents perceived the business climate as very good, 31 percent as good, 45 percent as neutral, 15 percent as poor and 2 percent as very poor.

There are also some markets where sentiment has improved slightly since last year: Brazil, South Africa, South Korea, the UK and Spain. 

At the other end of the scale, interest in investing in giant markets such as China and Germany appears to be on the wane, along with Taiwan and Mexico.

“Doing business in Germany comes with a lot of administrative work compared to Sweden, which is time consuming and costly,” EWAB Engineering GmbH managing director Fredrik Almcrantz said in the report. “Digitalisation doesn’t replace paperwork related to compliance with rules and regulations, it is just an added layer on top of traditional routines.”

Almost a third (65 percent) of Swedish businesses surveyed expect revenue to grow and plan to increase their global investments in the year ahead. A clear majority (70 percent) of companies were profitable last year, while 12 percent reached break-even and 13 percent reported negative results.

The Netherlands and France had the highest percentage of profitable Swedish companies, while the highest share of companies making a loss were reported in South Korea and Germany.

India, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia are among the countries on the list identified as having the most favourable business climates for Swedish companies, while Germany, Mexico and the Netherlands were rated lowest on the list.

India, Brazil and Indonesia also had the highest share of companies saying that the Swedish brand contributes “to an extent or great extent” to their success in those markets. At the other end of the scale were the United States, Canada and Saudi Arabia.

“In the Indonesian market, Swedish products are generally considered to be high quality, robust and durable,” said M. Syahrul Mohideen, area sales manager at ScanBox Thermoproducts AB.

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