Former car designer at BMW Group and Aston Martin Henrik Fisker isn’t planning on giving up his automotive dream anytime soon. He recently said that he has relaunched his namesake company and will reveal an all-new electric vehicle as soon as next year.
This is what Fisker told Bloomberg. His new company, called Fisker Inc., will take off the wraps of a new premium EV in the second half of 2017.
“We have really been working in stealth mode,” Fisker said. “For the last two years I have been looking at battery technologies and wanted to see if there was something that could really give us a new paradigm. We had the strategy of developing the technology as fast as possible without getting tied down to a large organization, which would hold us back. Now we have the technology that nobody else has. And there is nobody even close to what we are doing out there.”
The Danish car designer, responsible for creating top pieces such as the BMW Z8, Aston Martin V8 Vantage and DB9, saw his company go bankrupt back in 2014 but managed to keep a hold of his Fisker brand name. The company is now divided up into two separate divisions, including ‘Fisker Nanotech’, which is the company’s battery division based in Northern California.
While little is yet known, the company’s direct environment indicates that we can expect something big from the new Fisker EV. The main revolutionary aspect of the upcoming EV is its unparalleled range and battery life thanks to the use of new lightweight materials. Responsible for the development of the energy storage compartment of the battery are several professors from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). “We have already developed prototypes that you won’t see anywhere else”, said Jack Kavanaugh, Chairman of Fisker Nanotech.
640 kilometers of range, that is what all that technology should ultimately accomplish. Besides offering class-leading range and battery life, the new car is also said to be more practical and have more leg- and headroom than any of its closest competitors.
The new Fisker car seems to be crucial for the company’s future success. If all goes as planned, the new EV should pave the way for a second, more mass-market oriented vehicle that should rival the Tesla Model 3. A $40,000 price tag is what the company is aiming for, offering more driving range than the direct competition.
Besides working on new cars himself, Fisker said that his ultimate goal is to sell the battery technology to existing car manufacturers. “The idea is to move the entire auto industry, as it were, from VHS to DVD mode,” he added.
