Borgward revived a dead German car brand in China — then sold 3,530 cars and went bankrupt

Borgward was a German carmaker from Bremen that went bankrupt in 1961. In 2008, the founder's grandson Christian Borgward and investor Karlheinz L. Knöss revived the brand, backed financially by Chinese truck maker Foton Motor. The cars would be designed in Stuttgart and built in China. The brand relaunched at the 2015 Geneva Motor Show.

Initial sales were promising: about 75,000 units by January 2018, with the BX7 SUV as the flagship. In 2019, Foton sold its 67% stake to UCAR — the car-hailing company linked to Luckin Coffee's chairman Charles Zhengyao Lu — for $614 million. That year, Borgward reported a record 45,321 units sold in China, though the figure was inflated by UCAR buying Borgwards for its own fleet.

When the Luckin Coffee accounting scandal broke in 2020, the UCAR connection became toxic. Sales collapsed to 8,703 units in 2020 and 3,530 in 2021. Most production ceased. In December 2021, a Beijing court seized assets worth $345 million over unpaid debts.

On 8 April 2022, Borgward filed for bankruptcy in Beijing. The court approved the declaration on 5 December 2022. The brand that had been dead for sixty years was dead again — this time after selling fewer cars in its final year than a single Chinese dealership sells in a month.