The Final Days of Mosler: One Supercar Left to Move, Company for Sale

Warren Mosler, starved of orders and staff, is quitting the supercar business and trying to sell his company. In 26 years, Mosler sold fewer than 200 cars and now is down to two employees and one remaining car at his southern Florida headquarters. He hasn't sold a car for the past two years. "I don't have the energy to do another car or anything else," said Mosler, speaking from St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where he lives most of the year. "There's a whole pile of stuff, good inventory, and [I'm] looking for somebody else with a car disease that wants to live the lifestyle." So far, Mosler has had trouble finding a reliable buyer. "There's always one or two people buzzing around but nothing ever happens," he said. In the meantime, Mosler has listed all of his company assets for sale, including the automaker's 45,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Riviera Beach, Florida, replete with shop equipment and a working paint booth for $3.375 million. In the company's best years, Mosler said he sold "10 or 12" cars a year, employing up to 40 employees at a time. While Mosler, 63, jockeys between three other full-time gigs—economist, hedge fund manager, and three-time independent and Democratic political candidate (he recently lost his latest congressional bid in the Virgin Islands)—he blames himself for not having "the type of personality that sells cars." Mosler said that while he no longer wants to run the business, he would consider consulting for a new owner "if anybody ever buys it." His final car, a 2012 MT900S Photon, is unsold with a price of $479,000. As The Supercar World Turns In October, former Mosler chief engineer James Todd Wagner unveiled the "final Mosler supercar to be built," the Raptor GTR. But Mosler isn't selling this special 838-hp model. Wagner bought it shortly before leaving the company in January 2011, and had signed a 25-year distributor agreement to sell at least three cars per year in China and Thailand. What happened next is the stuff of soap operas. After Wagner left, Mosler already was in talks to sell his company. When a potential deal went south, Mosler blamed Wagner for ruining it when he allegedly demanded Mosler pay him $100,000 "in return for agreeing not to sue the new owner." Mosler refused. "He's nothing. He's got some serious mental problems," Mosler said. "He's out there billing himself as everything and he doesn't have anything." Their relationship had soured earlier when Wagner developed a new suspension setup for the MT900S Photon. Despite winning Car and Driver's 2011 Lightning Lap—amid a host of mechanical problems—Mosler blamed him for the Photon's performance, which was some four seconds off the pace set by the supposedly slower MT900S in the 2008 Lightning Lap competition. Now, Mosler says Wagner is claiming to be the official Mosler distributor despite their agreement being "moot" from lack of production. Wagner is more upbeat on his old boss. He says he loved working on the cars but said Mosler's "lack of advertising" and insistence on using Corvette taillamps turned away potential customers, who thought the MT900S was a kit. "The unfortunate thing is that the potential is so huge. So much work went into the engineering up front," Wagner said. "All the materials were the most expensive and top-tier stuff anywhere. Everything. Ev-ery-thing. It had everything except that last exoticness." The frustration continued throughout Wagner's seven years to the point where he couldn't use the word "exotic" when describing the car, he said. (Several of his ad proposals, Mosler said, featured "gratuitous sexual imagery" and were rejected.)  Earlier this year, Wagner shot a music video with scantily clad women dancing on the Raptor GTR, but even without Corvette taillamps, the $700,000 supercar still has no buyer. "It's a shame that it just didn't become the commercial success that it could have [been]," he said. The Fast and the Infuriating Indeed, despite impressive spec sheets and plenty of race wins—including at the Daytona 24 Hours—Mosler never attracted the loyal following or recognition of Lamborghini, Koenigsegg, or even Saleen, which built the mid-engined S7. Mosler's barely-street-legal creations—at best, raw and violently quick; at worst, ugly—have so easily dominated racetracks that they've all been penalized with added weight, engine restrictors, or outright bans from several international competitions (including Car and Driver's One Lap of America). On public roads, we've better tolerated Moslers on paper than on pavement. In the October 1991 issue, we tested one of Mosler's first road cars, the Consulier GTP Sport, which weighed less than a Honda CRX and was powered by a 2.2-liter four-cylinder engine sourced from Chrysler. While the "tenacious grip of the mid-engine chassis" was laudable, we wrote, the noise was deafening and the interior was "doing a good imitation of a pizza oven." Mosler's audacious bets that he would pay anyone $25,000 for beating the Consulier in a timed trial (later, raised to $100,000) were called foul by the press, including us, when we struck it down with a base Corvette. About 100 were sold. "From the start, it was a media failure," he said. Although terribly fast, later Moslers were loathed for their split, V-shaped windshields which Mosler said offered superior aerodynamics to traditional screens. Hardly any cars were sold from the late 1990s until 2006, when the MT900S—arguably, the first attractive Mosler—was released after a drawn-out federalization process. Despite its generally positive reviews, only about 60 cars were sold, including two dozen MT900R models racing in Europe and Asia. First Drive: 2013 Pagani Huayra First Drive: 2013 McLaren MP4-12C Spider First Drive: 2013 Ferrari F12berlinetta While Mosler Automotive may be headed to the graveyard like Vector and DeLorean, there still is hope for other American supercar manufacturers. Shelby Super Cars (no relation to the late Carroll Shelby) is intent on setting the fastest production car record with its 276-mph Tuatara. Other American tuner companies have dabbled in supercars, such as the 1244-hp Hennessey Venom GT. Mosler isn't second-guessing himself. "I think I could have taken the latest from Ferrari, produced it myself, and nobody would have bought it," he said. "It really wouldn't matter." 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