Electrifying
Having designed a ride for 007, Henrik Fisker now aims to bring Luxury EVS to the masses.
At the climax of a thrilling fight in 1999 James Bond film The World is Not Enough, Pierce Brosnan’s secret agent summons his BMW Z8 along a pier before using an inbuilt rocket launcher to take down a helicopter.
Moments later, a second helicopter, equipped with a dangling chainsaw, cuts the car cleanly in two as Brosnan scrambles away.
It might have been gripping stuff for viewers, but Henrik Fisker, the Danish- American designer who dreamed up the Z8, felt more dismay than elation.
“I knew the car was going to be in the movie, and we had provided some prototypes,” the 56- year- old says. “And finally I was invited to the premiere, which was the first time I even knew the car was going to be cut in half.
“I was very disappointed ... I thought James Bond was going to power slide out of a corner having left all the bad guys in the dust.”
Fisker recovered from that disappointment to become a designer for Aston Martin before spearheading a push into eco-friendly cars under his own name. He was in charge of production design for the Aston Martin DB9 and the V8 Vantage, leaving the company in 2005 to set up custom design business Fisker Coach-build — the first in a series of his own brand-name car firms.
The designer’s latest company is Fisker Inc. This January the firm attracted plaudits at technology conference CES by unveiling its first mass- market car, an electric SUV with a solar panel roof, a carpet made from recycled fishing nets and vegan suede made from bottles and T-shirts.
His previous venture, Fisker Automotive, created a sporty plug- in hybrid, the Fisker Karma, starting at US$102,000, before filing for bankruptcy after its battery supplier collapsed. The new Fisker Ocean — described by the company as the “world’s greenest car” — is pitched at a consumer with shallower pockets. At US$37,499 it’s not bad for an SUV.
Electric SUVS are having a bit of a moment. Ford’s Mustang Mach- E ( US$ 44,995) is due to be released early next year, and Tesla’s Model Y (US$39,000) is coming out this spring. All three companies have said their cars are meant to get more people buying electric vehicles. SUVS are the most popular type of vehicle in the U. S. and sales are growing in Europe, too. Why is Fisker, whose name is synonymous with Aston Martin and James Bond, moving away from the luxury market? Like his competitor Elon Musk, he says it’s all in aid of the environment.
“So far lower-cost electric vehicles have really been very boring,” he says. “So I thought there is an opportunity here to go into a market segment which is unoccupied.
“Even if everybody bought a luxury electric vehicle it’s still a very small market, and you’re not really fundamentally changing the world when it comes to pollution.”
But unlike Musk he has no ambitions to go any cheaper than this. The Fisker brand, he says, is still a “luxury” one. Truly affordable cars will be left to others.
Now living in Los Angeles, Fisker has embraced his adoptive home state. Tanned, with white hair and a white shirt, he looks every inch the coastal Angeleno.
The entrepreneur’s long career in the world of car design hasn’t been unblemished by controversy. In 2008 he was sued by Tesla, which claimed that the Karma used confidential information gleaned during Fisker’s stint doing design work on the Model S the previous year. An arbitrator ruled in Fisker’s favour and Tesla had to pay out US$1.1 million in legal fees.
In 2016, Fisker himself filed a lawsuit against Aston Martin claiming that his former employer was trying to stop him releasing another vehicle, the VLF Force 1. In the end the car came out in 2016 and no further legal action was necessary.
He believes these sorts of lawsuits will become less common as the car industry mellows and its bosses become less self- regarding. The need for cheaper battery technology is a more practical reason for a ceasefire.
“It’s a very egotistic industry where people want to say: ‘I made that car, it’s our engine’, but I think the industry is changing because the whole world is changing,” he says. “The car industry has to change. We have to make a more environmentally friendly car and we have got to share.”
To this end Fisker has a partnership with an unannounced battery manufacturer to help it produce the volume it needs at a cheaper price. “It’s an upside down moment in history. If I would have talked to you 20 years ago and said ‘ I’m launching a new sports car and it is going to be cheaper than Ford’, you’d say there’s no way, because Ford has the volume, but today they don’t. Tesla has the volume,” he says.
Sharing got Fisker into hot water in his last company, Fisker Automotive, which went under after his battery supplier collapsed. What’s different now?
“We put a beautiful car on the road and it’s still out there driving around,” he says. “I think we have a brand that is associated with being the first. It’s not always easy to be the first.
“The Fisker Karma came to the market in 2011, more than a year before the Model S. Obviously that means we had to take a lot of risks, such as with the battery technology, and that probably cost us our lives.”
He thinks it was too early to convince people that eco- friendly cars were anything other than a gimmick. “Very few people cared about recycling, the vegan interior, and made fun of it,” he says.
“Leonardo Dicaprio was also one of the first ones driving a Prius and everyone laughed about it, and then he bought our car, he was the first buyer. I think he was also ahead of his time.”
Now, he believes the demand is there — especially if you can convince young people, who are driving far less than their parents did, that they do need a car after all. Millennials, Fisker believes, don’t care about engines and horsepower. They just want a beautiful car they can afford.
Rather than paying the whole lot up front, after a US$ 2,999 down payment, customers can pay US$379 a month and then return their car after one month, eight months, 22 months or several years — no questions asked. Of course, in true millennial style, all of this can be done via an app.
Fisker says it will be released in the U. S. in early 2022 and elsewhere in the world later that year.
In a nod to its West Coast roots, the Ocean even has a California mode, which opens all the windows, the roof and the back windscreen, leaving space for your surfboard The only thing missing is a device to cope with chainsaw-wielding helicopters.