Obrist, the Austrian engineering firm known for putting a gas engine in a Tesla Model 3, has gone bankrupt. According to Electrek, three companies in the Obrist Group are insolvent with combined debts of roughly €31.8 million, or about $37 million. The two Austrian units filed for bankruptcy themselves and told the court that neither continuing nor restructuring was possible, so they agreed to shut down immediately. The parent company, Obrist Engineering, which makes thermal management parts, is not part of the filings.
The company spent more than a decade pitching its HyperHybrid range extender as a smarter alternative to battery-electric cars. It shrank a Model 3's battery pack to 17.3 kWh and added a 40 kW two-cylinder gas generator in the frunk, claiming 1,000 km of total range. Obrist later promoted a Model Y prototype running on synthetic methanol and claimed the technology could be "climate-positive." It never got a single production vehicle out of any of these projects, and an unnamed licensing partner it said would bring cars to market by 2023 never materialized.
Obrist also lobbied Brussels to reconsider the EU's 2035 ban on new combustion cars, arguing that its system would emit less CO2 than comparable battery-electric vehicles. Policy moved somewhat in its direction, but it did not help. The bankruptcy filing cites European automakers shifting to fully electric vehicles as one reason for the failure, while founder Frank Obrist pointed to years of high development costs and failed talks with investors. As Electrek notes, the range-extender concept itself is not dead—such vehicles sell in large numbers in China—but Obrist never became the company that proved it out.