I'm sure this is how they lost their first mover advantage, by choosing to reinvent the proverbial wheel of car manufacture instead of partnering with e.g. VAG, Ford, or even a Chinese company.
I think they could have pulled that off with a full-time CEO. The quality-control problems didn’t seem intractable, but they didn’t have the equivalent of a Shotwell providing the sober engineering execution which a hype-chasing CEO was never going to deliver.