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Fisker: The Next Big Shift

Why would a guy who invested his entire career in designing sleek 8 and 12 cylinder luxury sports cars and sedans with 400 hp gasoline engines shift to building a plug-in hybrid? Fisker Automotive founder Henrik Fisker explains how he came to create his car company, which has agreed to acquire GM's Boxwood Road car assembly plant in Delaware once it completes a 4-month-long due diligence study.

Two events converged: Fisker learned of Quantum Technology's Q-Drive plug-in hybrid electric drive system, while around the same time he began to notice a perceptible shift in consumer attitudes about the environment and petroleum dependency. Integrating Quantum's propulsion system into a high-end luxury sport sedan would enable Fisker to still offer affluent buyers a high-performance vehicle that also addressed these two concerns, as well as eliminating issues with driving range. The Karma could give 50 miles in electric-mode and then hundreds more in hybrid mode. But that first car, to be built in Finland, is priced just under $90,000; not something the average car buyer can afford. To date, the company has orders for some 1,500+ cars on its books.

However, based on a third-party market study funded by the U.S. Energy Department, Fisker believes there is a sufficiently large enough global market to warrant the investment in two new models, the first being a $40,000 plug-in sedan code-named Project Nina after one of the ships in Christopher Columbus's 1492 expedition to the Americas. Instead of a few thousand luxury model Karmas, he anticipates building "several hundred thousand" vehicles a year in the renovated GM plant. These car will be sold worldwide, he tells the audience, adding that he believes that half of them will be exported outside the United States on an annual basis.

"This is the biggest shift in the car industry probably since we went from the horse to the gasoline engine..."