Company that put gas engines in Teslas goes bankrupt owing $37 million — SkimNews
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- Three Obrist Group companies opened insolvency proceedings at Austria's Feldkirch Regional Court in late September, with combined debts of about €31.8 million (~$37 million) and no restructuring plan after courts found neither continuing nor restructuring possible.
- Obrist Powertrain (the HyperHybrid unit) owes roughly €18.85 million to 34 creditors and was down to nine employees; Obrist Technologies, which held methanol-production and CO2-capture patents, owes about €6.08 million to 10 creditors with no staff left; German sales arm Obrist DE carries about €6.8 million in liabilities.
- Parent company Obrist Engineering, which makes air-conditioning and thermal management parts, is not part of the filings and remains operating with about 30 employees.
- Founder Frank Obrist blamed years of high development costs, failed investor talks, and Europe's auto industry crisis; Austrian creditor group AKV additionally cited European automakers shifting to fully electric vehicles as a contributing factor.
- Over more than a decade, Obrist never delivered a production vehicle — escalating from a 2020 Model 3-based prototype with a 17.3 kWh battery and 40 kW two-cylinder gas generator in the frunk (claimed 1,000 km range), to a 2022 Model Y prototype running on synthetic methanol branded 'aFuel,' to a 2024 pitch for $18.6 billion 'gigaplants' claiming the world would need 2,700 of them at roughly $50 trillion to replace fossil fuels.
- Obrist spent years lobbying Brussels to soften the EU's 2035 ban on new combustion cars, arguing in late 2024 that a HyperHybrid would emit 85% less CO2 than a comparable battery-electric car and calling the technology a potential 'lifeline for the European automotive industry.'
Why it matters: Obrist's collapse underscores how thoroughly the market moved against range-extender pitches aimed at retrofitting EVs: even as the EU softened its 2035 combustion rules to accommodate e-fuels and hybrid exemptions, the company still could not find a customer, a license partner, or a path to production, leaving €31.8 million in unpaid debts across 44+ creditors.
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