Edison Motors, a budding automaker from South Korea, bought a 75% share in the now-bankrupt SsangYong from its former owner, Indian corporation Mahindra. According to The Korea Herald, the deal cost $260 million USD and was greenlit by a ruling of an insolvency court in Seoul.
Edison Motors is not even particularly well known in its home country, although it has been producing electric buses and trucks for more than six years now. The company is full of ambition now that it has the SsangYong brand in its hands, however, saying it intends to ‘overtake Tesla’ and ‘become the Apple Inc. of the electric car industry.’ Specific plans for the nearest future include making battery SUVs and crossovers on SsangYong platforms.
SsangYong faced insolvency in December 2020. Mahindra Group, which owned a 75% share in it at the time, repeatedly denied it financial help and wanted to get rid of its business involvement in South Korea for good. In the year 2021 alone, the suffering Korean brand requested $406 million USD from its Indian shareholder to get out of the debt. The lack of investment and new cars to sell ultimately killed it off, however, the last year concluding with a net loss of $150 million USD.
Edison had spent a while negotiating the deal, requiring a demonstration of certain ‘promising EV technologies’ to ensure that the purchase made business sense. For its part, SsangYong had repeatedly refused disclosing said tech citing IP theft concerns.
As of right now, the only SsangYong EV in existence is the SUV-shaped Korando e-Motion, which you can see in our gallery and the video here.