They rapidly hired staff from Lotus, Aston Martin, Jaguar land rover, and many others to try to set up their supply chain, engineering, and manufacturing capabilities. They could get 'the right' kind of people in.

Think they underestimated how eye-wateringly expensive it is to start producing cars (many thousands of parts from many hundereds of suppliers) without so much as a sniff of people putting deposits down etc. to confirm market demand.

No doubt if they showed a car off at geneva motor show they could get a decent order book even off hype alone for the first 6 months.