It was supposed to be the poster child of Europe's electric car future. Instead, it filed for bankruptcy this week, a poetic end to a company which has become synonymous with Europe's "green" debacle. 

For Swedish startup Northvolt AB, the route to collapse started in June when BMW AG canceled a multi-billion order. Back then, few saw the significance of the move, which effectively started a countdown that would culminate in a Chapter 11 filing less than six months later.

As Bloomberg details, Northvolt scrambled to keep the financing flowing, but as Germany's car industry fell deeper into a historic crisis, precipitated by a flood of cheap Chinese EV imports in the past three years...

... it became clear orders would dry up.

Setting off the infamous death spiral, the company responded to the lost revenue by retrenching expansion plans and slashing jobs. By the time the last attempt at an emergency plan failed, investors who had poured in $10 billion discovered only $30 million cash was left.

Northvolt's filing for bankruptcy protection in the US, announced Thursday, marks one of the highest-profile setbacks for European industry against cheaper and nimbler Chinese and South Korean competition. The following day, co-founder and CEO Peter Carlsson, who only a year ago had been trumpeting Northvolt as a possible IPO candidate, resigned and warned the European Union risks falling behind on green projects.

The company needs as much as $1.2 billion to finance its new business plan, Carlsson said, telling reporters that "we'll regret it in 20 years if we're not driving transition" to clean technologies. Translation: I already spent all the money, but if European taxpayers don't pony up to maintain my spending habits, they will regret it.

In addition to BMW and Volkswagen, Northvolt's top investors included Goldman Sachs's asset management arm, Denmark's biggest pension fund ATP, Baillie Gifford funds and a number of Swedish entities.

On Saturday, the Financial Times reported that funds run by Goldman Sachs Asset Management are set to write down almost $900 million at the end of the year.  The total loss is a sharp contrast to the bank's bullish prediction just seven months ago which told investors that its investment in Northvolt was worth 4.29 times what it had paid for it, and that this would increase to six times by next year. Spoiler Alert: it would decrease by 100%.