Honestly

What did not work.

All 21 records of 383 that the database counts as failed. This is not an editorial selection: the rule reads “status cancelled, superseded or paused, or a documented shortfall”, it also drives the “Failed” pill in the catalogue, and you can reproduce it yourself from /api/projekty.json, so those three numbers have to agree down to a single record.

How a record lands on this list

In two ways, and both are in the data. Carrying the status cancelled, paused or superseded: 20. A site standing idle for years is a failure whether or not anyone signed a decision to close it. Formally alive or completed, but carrying a documented shortfall material to their own scale, five per cent of cost and up: 1. How we compute the failure rate.

How much of it is a figure

Sunk costs, meaning money spent and lost: 2.8 bn PLN; the amounts are nominal and from different years, so they do not add up to anything comparable with today's prices; those recorded in a foreign currency enter the sum at the site fixed rate. Accounting write-downs, meaning a reduction of asset value on the balance sheet: 17 bn PLN; that is not the same thing as money spent, which is why it stands apart. Amounts named by a state audit or examined in an investigation: 2.1 bn PLN; those enter neither sum, because nobody has settled them yet. Records with no amount: 15. No amount does not mean nothing was lost: on one of them a source confirms the loss and gives it in several approximations that we do not combine into one figure, and on the rest nobody established it. The total is in zloty, so it also holds figures recorded in a foreign currency (1) at the site fixed rate. Each of those stands in its row as the source wrote it, so the column will not add up to this number directly. Of the sunk-cost total, 2.0 bn PLN stands on Wikipedia, which our independent-source count treats as zero (one record). A row carrying such a figure bears the same mark as the project card.

And even these are rarely black-and-white: Izera was cancelled, and the company that developed it is preparing a different car with Foxconn under a new brand. The post-Northvolt battery factory in Gdańsk is not on the list, although its investor went bankrupt: a new owner restarted production there. Every case is in the database – with full context.

The table scrolls sideways: the Cost and Shortfall columns are off screen.

Every row leads to the record and its sources. Amounts are nominal, with no inflation adjustment. A figure recorded in a foreign currency is converted at the site fixed rate (USD 4.00 / EUR 4.30) and the row shows it in the currency of its source.