I find the timing and content of these articles interesting. There have been a flurry of new articles in the last couple of weeks from multiple sources all proclaiming doom for Elio using the same 11/18/2016 SEC filing as a reference. If these had come out in early December, shortly after the SEC filing was released, I would have taken it as a reaction to the release of concerning financial information. But the timing of these articles leading up to EM hitting the 65k reservation mark and during a politically critical time for the DOE (and potentially the ATVM loan program) seems somewhat suspicious.
There's no conspiracy here. It's lazy web site operators.
1) Someone with a chip on their shoulder (jalopywhatsit this time) publishes a mostly inaccurate hit piece on Elio.
2) Someone else reads it, and copies it to their site, not bothering to do their own research, they just repost and link back to the original source.
3) Someone else sees it, and sees it posted twice, and decides that if two other people are reporting it, then it must be big news, so they post it, too.
The thing is, there are too many web sites, and not enough news. Everyone want their own web site, but none of them have the budget to hire people to actually, you know, do research, fact checking, and analyzing of the stuff they report. So it's all just a big circle jerk of everyone reposting crap they saw on some other site. None of them have a clue what's really going on, because they don't have the time to check it out, and wouldn't care even if they did. They post anything they can find so they get the hits, so they get the advertising dollars.
This is what modern media, and especially the "social media" has become. People don't realize that just because they *can* post stuff doesn't mean that their crap is worth posting.