Spyker Gets Russian Oligarch Money Injection

Spyker is a Dutch carmaker that’s been around, on and off, since 1999. Despite several promising starts, it only made some 265 cars to date and been through a couple of bankruptcies and several financial upheavals. Before filing for bankruptcy again in 2018, it was working on the C8 Preliator, presented at the Geneva Motor Show in 2017.

Not all hope is lost on the Preliator supercar, a new report in AutoCar suggests. Spyker is getting another lease on life thanks to a Russian oligarch money injection, and it’s planning a refreshed lineup for the next year, which includes two supercars and one SUV.

According to the publication, Russian oligarch and SMP Racing owner Boris Rotenberg (who bears close ties to Russian President Putin) and business partner Michail Pessis, both owners of limited-edition Spyker cars, will take Spyker out of shallow water and back into business. The plan is to build new cars in Germany, open a new store in Monaco and deliver three Spyker models to the premium market – and maybe even make a return to racing.

All three models will be debuted next year: the C8 Preliator Spyder (which will be the first to enter production), the D8 Peking-to-Paris SUV (based on the D12 concept shown at Geneva more than a decade earlier) and the B6 Venator (introduced in 2013). Whether the Preliator will retain the specs on the prototype shown three years ago remains to be seen: that one was supposed to be powered by a Koenigsegg-developed naturally aspirated 5.0-liter V8 engine, but the Koenigsegg deal fell through.