Comments on: Fisker's good Karma
At a dinner speech recently, Henrik Fisker laid out his plans for Fisker Automotive and its first car, the plug-in hybrid Karma.
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And you want him to make an affordable car? Did you read the article?
- by mattie121 July 4, 2009 7:41 AM PDT
- Fisker, like Tesla, is starting with some splash to make cash. Because they don't havea factory, they contracted for up to 20k units a year of Karma (expecting 15k in 2 years or so). Also, the chassis isn't really scalable to high volume production. (I was at the very same speech, hosted by the Western Automotive Journalists, www.waj.org). They have over 1300 "sales" lined up, and about 45 dealer locations.
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(4 Comments)Also, the notion that making a F*&#'IN CAR that people can afford with technologies that haven't yet achieved economies of scale is a dicey proposition at best. Seems to me it's a better idea to make product targeted to a market that can afford them to help create the volumes that will bring prices down to the point where the average people can afford them is a good play. These guys are no dummies, and have a path to growth that is believable. Henrik did talk about the next car a bit, mostly in hints, that is supposed to be a volume car. He didn't give much details, but did say the price would be lower and the volumes higher.
One thing the article failed to mention is that this drivetrain makes 900 ft-lbs of torque. There was also an interesting comment about the battery pack lifetime being about 8-10+ years. It's modular (in what would have been the driveshaft tunnel) and they fully expect that the batteries that will replace it in the future will probably have better specs than what's in it now.
Anyway, he gave a very good talk and I learned a lot about his vision.