V-Vehicle, the San Diego-based automotive startup whose investors include Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and T. Boone Pickens, has a new name and a new CEO. The company, which has been rechristened Next Autoworks, named former Tower Automotive CEO Kathleen Ligocki as chief executive earlier this week. Next Autoworks also has operations in Detroit and northeastern Louisiana, where the company hopes to hire 1,400 workers to manufacture its gasoline-powered, four-door compact at a former Guide Corp. plant in Ouachita Parish.
At Tower, Ligocki led a restructuring of the global automotive supplier that culminated in its sale for $1 billion to Cerberus Capital Management. Ligocki, who also served as CEO of GS Motors, replaces Ray Lane, the Kleiner Perkins partner who stepped in as interim CEO at the end of March, after the U.S. Department of Energy rejected V-Vehicles application for $320 million in loans under the agency’s Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing program. Founding CEO Frank Varasano and Horst Metz, the vice president of assembly operations, departed the company at the time.
David Langness, a spokesman for V-Vehicle in Los Angeles, declined to discuss the status of the revised DOE application the company submitted. “It’s up to the DOE to make that announcement,” Langness said.
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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