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The Fisker Karma plug-in hybrid is an intriguing vehicle. It is stunningly beautiful and comes with a host of compelling technologies, yet this 402-hp, 125-mph luxurious sports sedan will be priced at $87,900 when it arrives early next year, well below the less practical—and much ballyhooed—$110,950 Tesla electric roadster. But Henrik Fisker believes the reason his new company will succeed goes further than the Karma’s technology. Fisker Automotive will use a business model that differs from the auto industry’s formula of the past 100 years or so, whereby every new-model program now costs billions of dollars. “To build a car the old way,” says Fisker, “the venture capitalists wouldn’t put the money in because they want a quick return. We wanted to put all the money we raised into product development rather than building a factory.”
So, Fisker is not going to build the car—the company will outsource that job to Valmet Automotive, a Finnish firm that currently assembles the Boxster and Cayman for Porsche. Large parts of the car, such as the interior and the gasoline engine, will also be outsourced to companies such as Magna and General Motors.
Fisker’s engineering center in Pontiac, Michigan, has a long, open room that looks like the cube farm of many an American workplace. Some 175 engineers—fewer than 100 of whom are Fisker employees; the rest work for suppliers—are addressing every aspect of the design and manufacturing of the Karma in a single place, which Fisker says will aid the decision-making process.
“There are lots of good suppliers out there,” says Fisker, “and we have involved them earlier in the development program than is typical. We don’t need them 100 percent of the time in all of their capacity, which allows us to have a lower level of overhead than you typically have in a car company.”
Unusual for the CEO of a car company, Fisker isn’t a financial guy or an engineer but a designer. His 20-year career has included stints at BMW, Ford, and Aston Martin, and his résumé includes gems such as the BMW Z8 and the Aston Martin V-8 Vantage. After leaving Aston in 2004, Fisker and COO Bernhard Koehler, another former BMW designer, set up Fisker Coachbuild, where they rebodied Mercedes-Benz SLs and 6-series BMWs.
In September 2007, Fisker Coachbuild joined with Quantum Technologies, a company in Irvine, California, to form Fisker Automotive, specifically to design and build a plug-in hybrid. Quantum specializes in alternative drivetrains, notably a plug-in hybrid military vehicle built for the U.S. Army.
According to Fisker, Quantum shopped the military vehicle’s technology to a number of car companies, but the fact that it wouldn’t package in any current vehicle architecture meant no one was willing to bite. And that’s why the Karma has been designed from the ground up around the drivetrain. The resultant sedan was shown at the 2008 Detroit auto show.
Fisker believes fervently that the electric powertrain of the future will include a gas engine to alleviate the range and recharging-time issues of pure electrics. The Karma’s technology is essentially the same as in GM’s Volt: The Karma has a 50-mile range on electric-only power, which covers the needs of many motorists’ daily commutes, and 250 more miles are provided by a gasoline engine that acts as a generator. Any excess energy produced by the gas engine, as well as from regenerative braking, is sent to the battery.
It’s one thing to design a car and produce a full-size mock-up. It’s quite another to come up with the funding to build it in serious volumes. Fisker plans to build 15,000 Karmas a year, an ambitious goal considering the car’s price. He expects to turn a profit once 5000 have been sold through upscale car dealerships: More than 30 dealers have signed up so far.
The company says it has raised about $200 million in working capital. The money has come from four sources: Palo Alto Investors, a Silicon Valley asset-management company; Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture-capital company behind many of the tech industry’s most successful startups, including Google; the Qatar Investment Authority, the asset fund for the oil-rich Persian Gulf state; and Eco-Drive Capital Partners, a European-American investment consortium based in New York, which put in $85 million.
Fisker believes his model fits the changing nature of the auto industry: “You will need to alter vehicles faster because the technology is changing so rapidly. In the past, an automaker went seven or eight years on a model cycle, with a refresh halfway through. But the pace of battery development means they could well be half the size they are now in a very short time period.”
Another advantage Fisker says his company possesses is that it’s lean and focused. In addition to the 175 engineers (“and one receptionist”) in Michigan under the direction of Thomas Fritz, formerly an engineer for BMW and Magna, there are 30 more employees at the headquarters in Irvine, of whom half are development engineers and designers, with the rest in marketing, finance, and support. “We delegate decisions much farther down the food chain and have taken some calculated risks by releasing parts very early, relying on computer validation. We’re the only car company in the world that doesn’t have a product-planning department, too, because all the top people here know what the product should be.” He maintains that it costs most major car companies $100 million and 12 months to retroactively implement changes from focus groups.
Production of the Karma is scheduled to begin toward the end of the year, with deliveries starting in the first quarter of 2010. That means Fisker will likely beat GM to the market with this new and promising electric-hybrid technology.
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