HENRIK FISKER
Hotshot designer turned visionary CEO, Henrik Fisker tried and failed once with battery tech, now he’s taking on Tesla again. TopGear sat him down to discuss past, present and future
The Danish designer on his finest work, what happened to the Karma and how he’s going to transform the industry
HHas there ever been a car exec with a thicker skin and more bounce backs than Henrik Fisker? Once a high-flying young designer at BMW in the Nineties, he pinned the Z8 to his CV early, but quickly graduated to board member and design chief at Aston Martin, claiming the 2005 V8 Vantage as his finest hour. Later, as boss of his own eponymous company, he trailblazed plug-in hybrid tech with the Karma, before a battery supplier upset the apple cart. In the cracks between, he found time to pen the Artega GT (remember that?), have a hand in the Model S design, be sued (unsuccessfully) by Elon Musk and go into business with Bob ‘Maximum’ Lutz flogging coachbuilt Vipers. And now he’s back, taking the resurrected Fisker brand in a new direction with an all-electric, premium-but-affordable SUV that has Tesla looking in its rear-view mirror. We caught up with one of the car industry’s great enigmas and asked him to take us back to where it all began.
TOP GEAR: WHAT WERE YOU LIKE AS A KID?
Henrik Fisker: I was a troublemaker, I can tell you that. I was born in Denmark, where there’s no car industry. My father was an electric engineer, my mother worked in the tax department – normal, middle class upbringing, but my father loved cars. I remember being in the back seat of his Saab 95, and then later a Saab 96, and he liked to tinker with them himself. He’d always have two white Saabs so he could swap spare parts from one to the other, I thought it was so boring that they had to be the same colour. Eventually, I convinced him to buy an Alfa Romeo, and he’s stayed with Alfa ever since.
TG: YOUR FIRST CAR?
HF: An Alfasud. It had the 1.2-litre boxer motor with 68bhp which I blew up during a street race. That was before rev limiters, and I revved it too high, so I put in a 1.5 boxer, tuned in Germany to 125bhp which, at that time – I think that vehicle was only 800kg – felt insanely fast. I remember taking it up 200kph on the highway. I was a car nut.
TG: HOW DID YOU GET ON AT SCHOOL?
HF: I’d always drawn cars in school but my teacher told me, “There’s no such thing as a car designer, you can become an engineer.” I got a job as a technical draughtsman in Denmark and drove around in my Alfas. I also had an Alfa Sprint, the little Giugiaro coupe. Eventually, I wrote a letter to Volvo in Sweden saying: “I’ll do anything, I’ll sweep the floors, I just want to get into the industry.” The reply said: “Look, we don’t hire unless you have some sort of education, but we’re sponsoring a school called ArtCenter College of Design”, and they had just opened a branch in Switzerland.
That was in 1986, I must have been around 22, I quit my job, put all my drawings in my car – I had an Alfa GTV 2.5, the V6, by then – and drove down. I didn’t have a radio in it for a year because the engine sounded so phenomenal.
I finished there in 1989 and really wanted a job at Alfa Romeo, obviously. That was the time when Walter de Silva was there. I made an appointment, drove over the Alps but, in true Italian style, they forgot about the meeting. I met another guy but it was kind of a mess.
Later, at the school, Klaus Kapitza came in – the guy who designed the BMW 8-Series – and he really liked my drawings. He said: “Why don’t you come to BMW? Meet us next week.” I went to Munich and they offered me a job on the spot with BMW Technik – that was the little group that had just made the BMW Z1.
TG: GUESS YOU HAD TO GET RID OF THE ALFA THEN…
HF: No, but they offered me a test car that they had left over. I got the keys and I saw a BMW 318. Hey, not bad, two doors. I got in it, fired it up and it sounded strange. I opened the hood, and it was an early test vehicle for the new M3. I remember going out on the autobahn and driving until three in the morning, full speed. It was just like heaven.
TG: FIRST BIG ASSIGNMENT?
HF: It was called the E1, an electric car I wasn’t that excited about – a little two seater city car with lead-acid batteries shown at the Frankfurt show in 1991. I remember putting my newest suit on and standing there super proud. Not one person came by, nobody cared about electric cars at that point. I don’t think there’s a single picture in any car magazine.
TG: BUT THINGS IMPROVED FAIRLY RAPIDLY?
HF: Chris Bangle came to us and said, “Hey, we’ve got this art project. Somebody has to show the development chief how the 507 would have evolved.” It was just before summer vacation and nobody put their hand up, except me. I was done with this electric stuff, I wanted to do a sports car. What was unusual was the Z8’s design actually went through the board and straight to production without any changes. It was still right at that tipping point where car executives would have a pet project and just do it.
TG: AND A BOND CAR NO LESS…
HF: That was amazing. Apparently the director came into the studio because they were going to put a different BMW in it, and he saw an early show model of the Z8. Problem was when filming started the car wasn’t done so they had to quickly make some fibre-glass prototypes. Nobody was allowed to see the script, at least I wasn’t, but I did get an invite to the film premiere. I thought Bond was going to power slide away from a Ferrari or something, and when it ended up being cut in half I just remember going... “Ah.”
TG: WHAT CAME NEXT?
HF: I got job offers from Aston Martin and Ford at the same time. I chose to open Ford’s Ingeni studio in Soho London, then later I took over Ford Advanced Design in Irvine, so I flew between California and London for a couple of years. Then I went to Aston Martin, I got a very grand title: board member and design director. I remember
“I REMEMBER GOING ON THE AUTOBAHN AND DRIVING UNTIL THREE IN THE MORNING, FULL SPEED. IT WAS JUST LIKE HEAVEN”
asking where the ergonomics department was and finding out they didn’t have one. It was music to my ears when the engineering team said, “Well, it doesn’t matter how easy it is to get in and out of an Aston Martin, it has to look good. If it’s easy to get into it and it looks bad, nobody’s going to buy it.”
TG: IAN CALLUM FAMOUSLY SAID THE DB9 WAS 100 PER CENT DONE WHEN YOU ARRIVED AND THE V8 VANTAGE WAS 80 PER CENT THERE. IS THAT TRUE? IS HE PLAYING DOWN YOUR ROLE?
HF: I think designers always like to play down each other’s roles, but there were two models and I would say the Vantage looked exactly like a small DB9, so I completely changed that. It was actually a mid-engine car. I worked that around with Ulrich Bez, the CEO at that time, and said, “Let’s do a front engine car because there’s no point trying to compete with Porsche and Ferrari. That’s not what Aston is.” Definitely, there was a lot of work already done on the DB9, but I would say the V8 Vantage… that’s 100 per cent my design.
TG: WHAT DID LIFE AFTER ASTON LOOK LIKE?
HF: I’d had enough of the corporate world, I’d done the cars
I wanted to do, and I didn’t see myself sitting in this position forever just going to cocktail parties and managing a team.
I went out and did some speciality cars, but it wasn’t that successful. Then I designed a car called the Artega GT – had nothing to do with the business, I just did the design and got paid for it. I ended up meeting Martin Eberhard and Elon Musk from Tesla before anybody knew them, and they asked me to start working on the Tesla Model S as a design consultant, so we did that for a while, then they ran out of money in 2006. That’s when I started Fisker Automotive and began working together with a group that had this powertrain from the military – essentially a plug-in hybrid.
The idea was you could go in quietly behind enemy lines on electric, and then head back out using a diesel generator. We changed it to gas and revealed the Fisker Karma in 2008. Of course, Elon was pissed off and sued us, but at the end of the day, we won this lawsuit because it had nothing to do with what we had done for Tesla. We launched the Karma in 2011, which was more than a year ahead of the Tesla Model S.
TG: WHY DID THE KARMA FAIL?
HF: We had a start-up battery supplier in the US called A123. Right in the middle of the launch, we had delivered about 200 cars and were outselling Maserati and Aston at the time, A123 went bankrupt – it had had a couple of recalls it couldn’t afford. This was still before the Model S had launched, mid-2012, and everyone was saying electric cars were never going to work, so we couldn’t find any investors. At the end of the day, there was no way of moving forward.
I ended up bringing in Renault and Carlos Tavares. He was really ahead of his time because Renault already had electric vehicles, so they were keen to take a stake in Fisker and help us out. Unfortunately, our investors voted against it because they didn’t want to get diluted, so the deal never happened. We had Leonardo DiCaprio and Justin Bieber driving around in our cars at the time, but we had a lot of Silicon Valley investors that just didn’t understand the auto business and how difficult it was. It was a pity, but when a Chinese company called Wanxiang bought the company they didn’t realise the brand wasn’t part of it. They ended up just buying the assets, which is the design of the Fisker Karma and technology, which, in the meantime, was old.
TG: SO, YOU START THE COMPANY BACK UP AGAIN IN 2016, BUT YOU ALSO WENT INTO BUSINESS WITH US AUTO INDUSTRY LEGEND, BOB LUTZ. WHAT HAPPENED THERE?
HF: I didn’t want to sit on the beach somewhere and sip margaritas for the rest of my life, so I started just doing a bunch of things that I never had time to do. I designed a watch, I designed a boat and I knew Bob Lutz had always liked my designs. We had lunch somewhere, I think in Beverly Hills, and he said, “Hey, why don’t you join us and we’ll do some fun cars together?”
VLF stands for Villarreal and Lutz and Fisker, the three people in the company. It was really about having fun, we did a couple of different cars, but again, it’s a very difficult market to be in. I ended up in 2018 saying, “Hey guys, let’s separate. I want to do electric vehicles.” I wanted to do something to save the world, I really believe in sustainability and electrification.
TG: FISKER REBOOTS, WHAT’S DIFFERENT THIS TIME AROUND?
HF: The whole idea is asking, “How can we make the car experience easier?” I see two choices: we can wait for the politicians to ban cars, or the car industry can come up with cars that fit our society going forward. I chose the second one. We want to be the world’s first digital car company; you aren’t going to any dealers to buy a car, you’re buying on our app or our website. We’re going to deliver it to you at home, and if it needs a service we’ll pick it up and bring it back. It’s a much simpler experience.
With electrification, you’re going to see much more of a shared economy for two reasons. If you want the right pricing and volume, you have to share components and factories because nobody’s making 50 million electric cars. To get to the price point of gasoline, we’ve got to get up in volume. I think sharing with an EV makes a lot of sense, because if you drive a BMW or Nissan, you can tell, blindfolded, which is which by the engine. That’s not the case with silent electric motors.
TG: WILL YOUR LATEST PROJECT, A PURE-ELECTRIC SUV – THE FISKER OCEAN – BE BUILT ON A SHARED PLATFORM WITH A BIG MANUFACTURER THEN?
HF: I can’t talk about that yet, but it’s something in that direction, there’s definitely a lot of shared components in the vehicle. We showed it at CES and nobody’s been able to spot it yet…
TG: HOW MANY DO YOU PLAN TO BUILD?
HF: I’m a little hesitant to throw out numbers other than I think for a vehicle like this of this price class [from $37,499, production begins 2021], you’re going to have to make at least 50,000 vehicles a year. I would say 40 to 50,000 to make it financially feasible.
TG: WHY WILL THE OCEAN SUCCEED WHERE THE KARMA STUMBLED?
HF: Well, the Karma was different. It was expensive – a $100,000 vehicle – but the real issue was the chain of small start-up suppliers, it was a hugely risky venture. With the Ocean, we’ve completely sorted our chain. It’s from big, well-known suppliers.
If you look at any of the big car companies, when they introduce a new car, it takes them about three months to ramp up production, and then after that they build high-volume, quality cars, they just spit them out. You can see the new EV makers have difficulty with it… Tesla, but also Neo in China. I don’t want to hammer anybody, but it’s tough and costs more than you think. To avoid that, we are taking a different approach, working with, let’s just call them ‘professional people’ in the automotive world.
TG: WHAT DO YOU WANT YOUR LEGACY TO BE?
HF: I haven’t really thought about that. I love life, I think about the now, I always love the next project. The Ocean is done design-wise now, so I’ve already moved on to the next two things I’m working on. I just love designing, I love seeing a car come to fruition, getting on the road, people buying it. I’m a pretty simple guy.
“I DIDN’T WANT TO SIT ON THE BEACH AND SIP MARGARITAS FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE”