After a frenetic beginning to 2021, the special purpose acquisition company market has cooled off in recent months, with fewer SPACs filing to go public and many pre-deal shares trading below their $10 issue price. And we’re now seeing the aftereffects of the SPAC meltdown: in particular, an evaporation of SPACs looking to combine with electric vehicle startups.

Roughly 10% of SPAC mergers closing since April 1 involved EV companies, but less than 2% of new SPACs that have filed to go public in the same period are seeking to merge with EV companies, based on our analysis of data compiled by SPAC Research. That follows the poor stock performance of several EV-SPAC combinations over the past 12 months or so.