Has Windrose Reached the Point of No Return?

Lawsuits by former employees for unpaid wages have been a story in the West for about a year now. Travis Waite, a former Windrose employee, also recently posted to LinkedIn an article from China (and translations of the article) with similar stories of unpaid wages and staff leaving in China. There are also odd claims about a missing truck and falsified VIN codes.

I am not really in a position to evaluate the truth of these stories, but given the large number of claims and negative comments from different sources, it seems unlikely that all these unproven claims are false and everything is totally rosy at Windrose. If the claims are mostly true, then Windrose is clearly in big trouble.

Large companies can survive longer due to having bigger safety nets and some credit from their long-established reputation, but there is only a certain amount of negative coverage and problems that a young or mid-size company can have before the industry and customers lose confidence in them. Human nature seems to sometimes mean we ignore a few bad things at first that we should have paid attention to and then switch over to a point where it’s too much and we are prepared to throw someone – or a company – completely under the bus. It is going to be harder for Windrose to recruit the best quality people now when they need them.

A point of no return can be reached. That doesn’t necessarily mean the company will go bankrupt and shut down this year or next year. It may be absorbed into another company or struggle on for years and years at a low level stuck in a limbo between total failure and real growth and success.

Has Windrose reached a point of no return? The truck itself has not been questioned, but was their low-cost offering too good to be true, or might it all have worked out with better management, luck or timing? I won’t attempt to answer that, but I think the odds of them putting all of this behind them and mass-producing thousands of trucks per year for years and years look relatively low at this point.