Update: Fisker's high end-plug in. Pictures revealed

Fisker Automotive. Think of it as a marriage between the Chevy Volt and the Tesla Roadster.

The company is planning to come to market in about 18 months with a high-performance, high-end, plug-in hybrid sedan. The car will cost $80,000. It will go about 50 miles on a battery charge, which isn't far, but the car will also come with a built-in gas engine that exists primarily to charge the battery. With the charging capability, the car can go hundreds of miles, according to Henrik Fisker, the company's CEO.

With a range of hundreds of miles, the car will go farther than other electric cars coming to market. The new electric cars go only about 225 miles on a single charge at best. Granted, Fisker's car uses a little gas--something electric cars don't--but it won't burn much. This is how the Volt functions. General Motors, however, doesn't plan on coming out with the Volt until 2010. If Fisker hits its goals, it will have cars on the market in 2009. Fisker, though, is also aiming at the luxury end of the market with its alternative car, which makes it like Tesla. Its tag line is "Eco-chic."

Fisker also hopes to come out with SUVs and other types of cars. The drive train comes from Quantum Technologies, by the way. Quantum works with a number of companies and government agencies on alternative fuel vehicles. Initial production will be about 15,000 vehicles a year.

The company will show off a prototype at the Detroit Auto Show, according to the company's somewhat cryptic Web site.

In this day and age, it seems everybody has started an alternative car company. There is Tesla, Miles Automotive, Zap and Venture Vehicles. Everyone but my grandmother, and that's because we took her license away.

But Fisker does have something a lot of these other companies don't. Namely, experience in the auto industry. Henrik worked for years at Ford and BMW. He came up with the BMW Z8 and the Aston Martin DB9.

Thanks to Greg King of Wostec for pointing out the Fisker presentation at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy Innovations Conference taking place in Redwood City, Calif., this week.

[theBike45]

Another day, another unlikely EV

Any electric car that costs over $50,000 will have zero effect on anything - crude avoidance, emission reduction, you name it. However, at least
Fisker understands cars enough to know that Tesla's 250 mile driving rnage simply doesn't hack it. Noboy's gonna pay $100,000 for basically a county car (you can drive it anywhere in the county and get home). Americans need state and national cars, not county cars. Tesla cars work fine on relatively small Pacific islands. The
U.S. is not the place for a Tesla.

[feliks2]

Another day, another LIKELY EV towards not-so-distant electrification

Actually new technollogy always nearly always comes out on high-end equipment, and everntually filters down to the masses, so this should have a fairly large effect on the industry. As for the range, the average person drives something like 30 miles a day, less than one eight of the Tesla's range. People drive more than 250 miles a day very rarely, and if they do, it is virtually a given that they also own a regular car. So believe me, plenty of people will pay $100,000 for a "county car" as you put it.