Quote:Fisker.me is the exclusive owner's only website and community providing personalized resources and vital vehicle information.
Coming Soon

• Four-door, Four Passenger Sedan
• Lightweight Extruded Aluminum Spaceframe
• Lightweight Aluminum and Composite Body Panels
• Optimized, Lightweight Aluminum Design
• Energy Efficient, 'Modular' Chassis Subassembly
  

• Electric Drive motors: 2x 150 kW (403 HP Total)
• Battery: 20 kW (Peak) Lithium-ion Located Longitudinally Below Floorpan Along the Centerline
• Gasoline Engine: 260 HP Turbocharged 2.0 liter Direct Injection
• Driving Experience: Single Speed Fixed Gear
• Linear opposed to exponential acceleration
  

• Lithium-ion power only
• 0-60mph = 7.9 sec
• Top Speed = 95mph (153 km/h)
  

• Lithium-ion power / Internal Combustion Engine (ICE)
• 0-60mph = 5.9 sec
• Top Speed = 125mpg (200 km/h)
  

• 50 miles electric only (80km) - [100mpg (2.4L/100km) equivalent]
• Total Combined Range = 300 miles (483 km)
  

• Load-leveling Rear Shock Absorbers
• Mono-tube absorbers
• Tuned to control level of roll dampening
• Flat cornering with little body roll
  

• Front Dual Advanced Restraint System with Knee Airbags
• Standard Curtain and Seat (Pelvis/Thorax) Side Airbags
• ABS / Electro-Hydraulic Traction Control System / Electronic Stability Control (ESC)
• Lower Anchors & Tethers for Children (LATCH) system for three seating positions (front passenger & two in 2nd row)
• Design meets or exceeds Global Crash Protection Standards (including rollover)
• Lightweight aluminum frame
  

• Electro hydraulic brake boost unit with integrated chassis control function
• ABS, traction control, stability control
• Advanced regenerative blended brake system for maximum energy recapture and improved range
• Large (370mm) diameter vented rotors and 6-piston monobloc calipers
• Electrically actuated parking brake with capacitor back-up
  

• Custom Fisker designed 22 inch rims
• 255/35/R22 Goodyear 285/35/R22 Goodyear
• Tire Inflator Kit
  

• Overall Length: 196.7 in.(4996 mm)
• Overall Width: 78.1 in. (1984 mm)
• Overall Height: 52.4 in. (1330 mm)
• Front Overhang: 35.9 in. (913 mm)
• Rear Overhang: 36.3 in. (923 mm)
• Wheelbase: 124.4 in (3160 mm)
• Front track: 66.6 in. (1692 mm)
• Rear track: 67.0 in (1701 mm)
  

Wired Magazine via Fisker Automotive Wrote:Henrik Fisker’s ‘Timeless’ Automotive Designs

Henrik Fisker uses a single word to describe his design aesthetic: timeless.

Fisker is the founder and CEO of Fisker Automotive, a company hoping to shake up the auto industry and prove eco-friendly cars can be as lustworthy as the finest luxury sedans. But Fisker is, first and foremost, a car nut, one whose highest ambition is to design cars that will be as beautiful 50 years from now as they are today.

“The thing I really believe in is, in a word, timelessness,” Fisker says. “That’s something you have to put into car design.”

His designs draw as much inspiration from the human body as they do the classic cars of the past. They are long and muscular, like an athlete, and he has called them a “human-like form of sculpture.” Proportion is paramount. He believes cars look best with flowing lines, short overhangs and an assertive stance, which explains the look of his Karma plug-in hybrid (shown above).

“The Karma shows the perfect proportions of an automobile,” he says. “It’s long and low with short overhangs, large wheels and sweeping line. We wanted to design a car we knew no other automaker would do.”



Fisker Sunset

Planned production TBA

The Karma isn’t slated to roll into driveways until sometime next year, but Fisker already has his second model in the works — the Sunset, a convertible based on the Karma. From the start, Fisker had only one goal: Create the ultimate open-top luxury car.

“There was no compromise made on that,” he says. “Its all about beauty and the open road.”

The open road is where Fisker, who was born in Denmark, fell in love with cars. He was a boy riding in his father’s Saab 96 when a Maserati Bora passed by. Fisker found it utterly gorgeous. The die was cast, a design aficionado born.

“I realized I love the way cars look,” he says. “I wanted to be a part of it. Like most little boys, I was drawing cars. Sooner or later they grow out of it, but I never did.”



BMW Z8

2000–2003



The BMW 507 was the inspiration for the Z8.

Fisker graduated from the Art Center College of Design in Switzerland in 1989 and went to work at BMW Technik, the automaker’s advanced-design center. It’s where BMW develops some of its most innovative ideas.

Fisker spent 12 years at BMW and made his name with the Z07 concept car, which became the Z8 roadster in 1999. It resembled nothing BMW was making at the time, and it looked back at the company’s heritage even as it looked to the future.

“My inspiration was the BMW 507,” Fisker says. “The task was how would that car have looked if it evolved like the Porsche 911 evolved. That’s why it has that slightly retro look. But the thing I really like about it is — even if at first glance it has a retro look — it is very, very modern.”



Aston Martin DB9

2004–present



Fisker left BMW for Ford in 2001 and became design director at Aston Martin, which Ford owned at the time. His first job was wrapping up the DB9, a design started by his predecessor, Ian Callum. (Callum, in an interview with Car & Driver, says “pretty much 100 percent” of the design is his, a point Fisker vigorously denies.)

“My time at Aston Martin was very interesting because I came from BMW, which had this huge design-and-engineering department,” Fisker says. Aston Martin, on the other hand, was a far-smaller operation that allowed him greater say in the car’s design and development.

In working on the DB9, as he did with the Z8, Fisker drew from his employer’s storied heritage and most-beautiful cars. He was particularly inspired by the DB4 GT Zagato.

“I brought back the strongest elements from the best of Aston Martin’s history,” he says.



Aston Martin V8 Vantage

2005–present



Jaguar XK-E, one of Fisker's favorite designs.

Fisker draws tremendous inspiration from the past, because it speaks to his “timeless” aesthetic. He counts the sensual Jaguar XK-E and the angular Maserati Boomerang concept as two of his favorites. And he’s especially partial to Giorgetto Giugiaro, whose work ranges from the Ferrari 250 GT to the Volkswagen Rabbit to several Nikon cameras.

Of course Fisker admires the work of the big Italian design houses like Carrozzeria Bertone, but he also is influenced by American designers, particularly those who shaped the luxury and muscle cars of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.

“Growing up in Denmark, they were dream cars for me. Cars like the early Pontiac Firebirds,” he says. “People might laugh now, but at the time they were very cool. I draw influence from American car design. In the 1950s and 1960s, American cars were extravagant. They were generous with form. They were affordable cars that were very dramatic.”

After completing the DB9, Fisker turned his attention to the V8 Vantage. (Again, Callum says he was largely responsible for the design, telling Car & Driver “a good 80 percent” of it is his. Fisker vigorously denies this claim.) Here, as always, Fisker focused heavily on giving the car the “right proportions” — a long hood, short overhangs and an aggressive stance.



Ford Shelby GR-1

2005



Concept and show cars are where designers really get to stretch their wings, and the Shelby GR-1 radically reimagines the Shelby Daytona Coupe race car of the 1960s. Fisker didn’t design it — that was done by George Saridakis, for a project conceived by J. Mays, Ford’s global VP of design. But he led the Global Advanced Design Studio where the car took shape.

Although Fisker cites many high-dollar sports and luxury cars as his favorite designs, he finds inspiration everywhere. Even a Hyundai might spark an idea and get him sketching.

“It might make me think, ‘Hey, they tried something different’ and it will make me think of something,” he says. “I think about car design every day as I go back and forth to work, looking at cars.”



Fisker Tramonto

2005

Fisker left Ford in 2005 to launch Fisker Coachbuild with Bernhard Koehler, with whom he worked at BMW and Aston Martin. The company was an anachronism, a return to the days when specialized design houses made bodies for cars built by others. Coach building was common before World War II and led to some of the most beautiful cars ever made.

Fisker Coachbuild’s first car was the Tramonto, a roadster based on the Mercedes-Benz SL. Fisker gave the car a longer hood line and a slimmer rear with no visible bumpers. Fisker spends a lot of time designing the back end of his cars, an area he says is too often overlooked.

“Too often you walk around a car you’ll find beautiful and you’re disappointed when you get to the back,” he said. “They’ll have square taillights or an unsightly bumper or they just aren’t very distinctive. The back of a car is a place where I think you can create a strong, beautiful design.”

And not just because it’s the only thing people will see if you’ve got a particularly fast car like a Tramonto. When fitted with carbon bodywork and a supercharged V-8 from the Mercedes-Benz SL55 AMG, it’ll do zero to 60 in (a claimed) 3.6 seconds.



Fisker Latigo

2005

Fisker’s second coach-built car was the Latigo CS, based on the BMW 6-Series coupes. Again, he gave the car a sleeker front and a tidier rear. Although you can see the Bimmer’s DNA, the Latigo doesn’t look quite like anything else, which is the point.

“We wanted people to wonder, ‘What is that?’” Fisker says.

Fisker Coachbuild uses exotic materials like magnesium, and forms the body in aluminum, steel and carbon fiber. It also customizes the drivetrain and interior to each customer’s taste. That makes the vehicles frightfully expensive — Fisker says they cost $300,000 and up — but ensures a high level of exclusivity. Although each car was slated for a production run of 150 vehicles, no more than a handful were built.

“We wanted customers to be able to personalize the vehicles,” Fisker says. “No two of them are the same. But we knew that was not a long-term business model.”

And so Fisker Coachbuild and Quantum Technologies launched Fisker Automotive in 2007 to develop the Karma plug-in hybrid.



Artega GT

2009–present

Fisker can design mid-engine cars, too. The Artega GT is a super-exclusive two-seater built by German boutique builder Artega Motors. Fisker drew influence for the design from cars like the “Ferrari” Dino 246, one of the most beautiful sports cars ever.

Fisker has big plans for his eponymous company. He says he’ll deliver the first Karma sedans to customers next year and begin producing the Sunset convertible in 2011.

Beyond that, though, he’s looking ahead to an “affordable” mid-sized plug-in hybrid sedan codenamed Project Nina. The Department of Energy was impressed enough to lend Fisker Automotive $528 million to help get Nina rolling. He’s already lined up a factory in Delaware to build the car, which he says will be here in mid-2012.

And what will it look like?

“You can expect that it will be the most beautiful car in its class,” he says, promising a car about the size of a BMW 3-Series. “It will set new standards. And that’s all I’ll say.”

Quote:IRVINE, CA – July 19, 2010: American automaker Fisker Automotive today finalized its purchase of a former GM factory where it will build plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.

Autoblog Wrote:When Fisker received $189 million in funding, the company gave a production target date for its long-awaited Karma of February of 2011. Fisker recently held a second coming-out party at its Santa Monica dealership to stoke the fires again, during which dealer principal Mike Sullivan began to color in some details of the run-up to February.

Sullivan said that at the LA Auto Show November 19-28 there would be full-sized Karma mockups showing off color and interior combinations. Immediately after the show, prospective customers can go to the dealer and take the car on test drives, and with production beginning in Q1 of 2011 the deliveries would begin in March and April.

Wired Wrote:Tucker, Cord, Delorean—the history of the auto industry is full of entrepreneurs who set out to rethink how cars are made. Most of them went bankrupt. Henrik Fisker is looking to buck that trend, challenging Tesla, Nissan, and GM with an ambitious entry into the amped-up field of electrified autos. After conjuring up such lust-worthy machines as the Aston Martin DB9 and the BMW Z8, the designer is now CEO of his own startup, Fisker Automotive. He aims to rock the market with a gorgeous $90,000 plug-in hybrid and a business model that’s more Silicon Valley than Motown. Wired talked to Fisker about how he plans to use a big idea, a tiny staff, and an open supply chain to blow the doors off Detroit.

Wired: GM went bankrupt; Chrysler is disintegrating. Is this really a good time to start a car company?

Henrik Fisker: It’s the perfect time. Especially for an environmentally minded automaker. Governments are handing out money—in April we got a $529 million loan from the US Department of Energy—and consumers are ready to change their lifestyles in the name of the environment.

Wired: No offense, but outside the auto industry, hardly anyone has even heard of your company. Where did you come from?
Photo: Joe Pugliese

Henrik Fisker says his company will sell more cars than Porsche by 2016.
Photo: Joe Pugliese

Fisker: I come from Denmark; Fisker Automotive comes from California. When we first showed the Karma in January 2008, we had barely started the company. In fact, we had just incorporated in August of the previous year.

Wired: You went from incorporation to unveiling a car at the Detroit Auto Show in only five months? That’s insane.

Fisker: Well, it was really just a shell; it didn’t even have a drivetrain.

Wired: OK, you had a shell in 2008—yet you promised delivery by 2010?

Fisker: You know what? Starting a car company is risky. We were brand-new, and we needed investment to develop our car. But we needed a car to attract those investors.

Wired: You got the funding—from Kleiner Perkins and now the DOE—and you’re already set to deliver your first vehicle. How did you do in three years what usually takes five?

Fisker: Most automakers develop multiple options for a single project. Then they present those options to a committee of executives who decide which one to go with. That takes a lot of time. I’m our head designer, and I’m also the chief executive; I choose a direction very early on, and we don’t look back. We don’t waste time doing 3-D models and design work for products that will never exist.

Wired: So being small can actually give you an advantage over the big guys?

Fisker: Absolutely. The industry hasn’t really changed since the last century. The big automakers are bogged down by excessive management and staff. They’re inefficient. We’re modern, fast, and light. Take the design process: At a typical car company, it lasts about 12 months. At Fisker it’s two. And we don’t feel the need to create every component in-house, either. We encourage suppliers to use our vehicles as a test bed for new ideas. Then we help them develop the technology and adapt it to our car.

Wired: Sounds like you’re outsourcing a lot. Doesn’t that make Fisker more of a design firm than a car company?

Fisker: No. A car has about 3,500 parts. Every time you move one of them 5 millimeters, several hundred others have to move as well. We have to integrate every component into a crash-worthy package that meets our performance expectations. That’s the hard part.

Wired: But it’s probably cheaper than developing all those parts in-house.

Fisker: Much cheaper. Say we wanted to design the stamping presses that make our fenders. We’d need 15 or 16 engineers just for that task. It would be hard to make money with 16 engineers working on every component. So we don’t. We have one. And we can turn a profit by selling as few as 15,000 vehicles.

Wired: Which is exactly how many Karmas you’re planning to build.

Fisker: Exactly, but that’s only the beginning. We just bought a factory in Delaware where we’ll produce our next car: a $40,000 model aimed at the mass market. We’ll be producing 100,000 a year by 2013. And we’ll have six models for sale by 2016.

Wired: You realize that will make you bigger than Porsche, right? In a fraction of the time that Porsche has existed.

Fisker: Yes, but that kind of growth isn’t unusual these days. Look at Google: They’ve been around for just over a decade, and they have a larger market cap than Coca-Cola. Look at Apple: They took 20 percent of the premium phone market in the US in six months. Now look at us: We created the premium green-auto market, and we’ve already got a waiting list 1,600 customers long.

Edmunds Inside Line Wrote:If California had a state car, it would be this bright orange Tesla Roadster. It looks sensational in the fierce Los Angeles sun, as its eerily silent, electric-powered acceleration makes it an orange streak through the rush-hour traffic. You feel dangerously exposed to the vast Hummers and Suburbans on either side, but the Tesla Roadster makes the crass SUVs look like dinosaurs whose time have long since passed.

"Is that an Italian car?" a driver yells at a stoplight. "No," I'm pleased to answer. "It's from about five blocks back that way."

We're in the New Detroit, the place where investors, car-makers and a bunch of new technology companies have come together. They think they can do things better, and they're going to do it with electricity. We're in California — Los Angeles, to be exact.

Electrified Futurism
Though Tesla's headquarters lies in the San Francisco Bay Area, its design studio now is in Hawthorne, a suburb near the Los Angeles airport once noted for the manufacture of fighter planes. Henrik Fisker is developing his $87,900 Fisker Karma plug-in hybrid in Irvine, just about 40 miles away. And AC Propulsion (ACP), the technology company that scienced much of the drivetrains that underpin the Tesla and Fisker, is located in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, too. Meanwhile, small firms in San Francisco and Los Angeles are working on developing infrastructure, while the money flows from venture capital firms along Sand Hill Road near Stanford University in the Bay Area.

So is California the New Detroit? Will the next great technological leaps come from these firms and not the old-world industrial giants back East? And could one of these companies go supernova, Google-style, and become the next General Motors?

It's easy to dismiss the idea when you consider that only Tesla has actually put any cars on the road yet, and even then only a thousand examples of an otherwise irrelevant $100,000 sports car. Meanwhile, the other players are hip deep in unfulfilled promises about the future. But technology start-ups don't follow normal growth patterns. The recession that nearly did in Detroit has only helped Tesla and Fisker. Each has received approval for loans of around $500 million from the $25 billion Advanced Technology Manufacturing Loan Program announced by Congress in November 2008.

I need to do what I can to steer this ship around, away from making these death-creating explosion machines.

If you want to predict the future, it's useful to follow the money. And right now the money is coming here to the New Detroit.

Making the Motors of the Future
AC Propulsion lies in San Dimas, a Los Angeles suburb better known for its water park than its technology base. We park the Tesla Roadster in front of three utterly anonymous buildings in an industrial park. The only sign of what lies within is the presence of a place to plug in the Tesla so it can charge while we're inside.

The firm was founded in 1992 by Alan Cocconi, an engineer involved with the 1990 GM Impact concept car and the General Motors EV1 electric car, 1,117 examples of which were built between 1996 and 1999. AC Propulsion's most important accomplishment since then has been the all-electric tzero drivetrain, which it licensed to Tesla and which powers the 500-strong test fleet of Mini Es. AC Propulsion has been regarded as the visionary of the electric car revolution, although as former Tesla executive Darryl Siry once noted, "They lacked the entrepreneurial vision to see how big an idea this would become and the means to achieve it."

Tom Gage, AC Propulsion's lanky, laid-back CEO, laughs at that. "We're a bunch of engineers here; we're not venture capitalists. Sure it's possible that we don't end up making the big money, but we're the only company in this business making any money at all right now. Tesla and Fisker have huge investments. It will be a long time before they see black ink."

The premises look like the lair of a mad inventor. The area where the batteries, electric motors and power electronics are stored and assembled is surgically clean, but the main workshop is, frankly, a bit of a mess and appealingly low-tech, full of greasy, grimy drills, mills and lathes — everything you need to build a complete car from scratch. Outside there's a pile of discarded gas tanks from the business ACP does in converting conventional cars to electric propulsion. "We don't know what to do with them," Gage jokes about the gas tanks. "Nobody seems to want them."

Do Electrons Attract or Repel?
AC Propulsion's CEO doesn't think that the new car businesses clustered around L.A. and San Francisco see themselves as a New Detroit. Relations between the firms seem to be marked by bitterness and legal action rather than by a sense of common purpose. In late 2008 Tesla lost a lawsuit it brought against Fisker, and it sounds as if there might be another row brewing between ACP and Tesla.

"It's fairly competitive," says Gage. "There's a lot of inventor's jealousy; mine is better than yours, that kind of thing. We're all engaged in the same thing — trying to build cool cars that people will want to buy.

"We licensed all our patents to Tesla. They built their drive systems under those patents for the first 500 cars, then announced abruptly that they'd changed the design and accordingly were no longer paying the royalties. There has to be an accounting at some point and the time is approaching when we have to confirm if that is true or not."

The Tesla Connection
We coil up the Tesla Roadster's charge cable and move off into the L.A. traffic. We're reminded again that countless surveys indicate drivers despise the need to visit the gas station and will do anything to avoid the chore. Much of the enthusiasm driving the electric car comes from this hatred of gas stations.

Though the final assembly of Tesla Roadsters takes place at Tesla's headquarters in a small industrial building near the train tracks in San Carlos up in the San Francisco Bay Area, the firm's design studio lies in this aircraft hangar in Hawthorne where fuselage sections for the Boeing 747 airliner once were built. The most visible player in the Tesla game is Elon Musk, the engineer who made his money when he sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. The proceeds have gone into SpaceX, his company dedicated to create a private spacecraft for public access, as well as Tesla. This building is a vast silver edifice on Rocket Road, the opposite of AC Propulsion's unassuming premises.

Tesla's chief designer Franz von Holzhausen meets us and immediately launches into a tour of the Space X factory. We've just missed the colossal Falcon 9 rocket, which is about to be launched for the first time, but we can still gawp at the prototype Dragon manned module. The tour is a substitute for access to the Tesla design section. There's so much new, secret product in a small space that it can't all be hidden, and we just can't be let through the door.

Drawing the Electric Sedan
Von Holzhausen joined Tesla last year after a brilliant term at GM where he did the Pontiac Solstice and then a time with Mazda where he created the Furai and Nagare concept cars.

"To be in at the start with a company that could be one of the great American brands is the opportunity of a lifetime," Von Holzhausen says. "This is where industry needs to go. It needs to have more thinking like this. The recession weeds out the dead wood. We're seeing the break-up of the norm because it hasn't been delivering what the consumer needs."

Von Holzhausen says he's invigorated by the Silicon Valley pace of innovation, where decisions are made quickly. "Here it's just Elon and me," he says. "We make the decisions. It might be 8 a.m. or 11 p.m.; it doesn't matter, though more often it's late in the evening. But having that direct connection is what will take this brand to market quicker and make the product more focused."

Von Holzhausen takes us for a brief drive down Rocket Road in the concept vehicle for the Tesla Model S electric sedan, fitted with a Roadster drivetrain. The designer says the car's appearance is 90 percent of the final production version. It looks sensational, designed simply to be beautiful, rather than to underscore its environmental credentials.

"When I first came to California to study car design at Art Center College of Design in the late 1980s, it was two months before I could see through the smog to the other side of the valley," Von Holzhausen says. "I thought even then that it was ridiculous, and that if automobiles are doing this and I'm part of this business then I need to do whatever I can to steer this ship around, away from just making these death-creating explosion machines. So really, that's why I'm here. We live or die — literally as a business and as individuals — on getting this technology into people's hands."

Early Adopters Have Lots of Money

"We were in the right place at the right time," says Henrik Fisker, leaning back in his chair in his brightly lit design office. Now that Fisker has closed its engineering center in Detroit and centralized its operation here in L.A., almost all of the building is packed with product secrets so no public access is permitted. Fisker even had to clear a bunch of sketches off the drawing board before he could let us in.

Noted for his contributions to the Aston Martin DB9 and BMW Z8, Fisker admits that his step toward car manufacturing was a big one. "Two years ago when we started out, our plan was to build the Karma, make some money, then think about another car," he says. "In the meantime GM and Chrysler went bankrupt and suddenly the government saw that we still need car industry in the U.S., so they created these loans and we got a half a billion dollars which accelerated our plans dramatically."

Fisker's plans are particularly bold: not just for their sheer scale, but for his aim to export half his production from the U.S. to the world's major markets, including those that have spurned American cars in recent decades. "Nobody needs another supercar and America doesn't have a history of making them," he says. "But America does have a history of innovation and this is not just a new car, it's a new technology and a sexy design. It's like the iPhone.

"If you want to be successful you have to design vehicles for the world, but for the past 30 or 40 years they've been designed for the U.S. market only. I don't know if that's to do with being in Detroit, but it's a fact. But California is a melting pot; it's a very international place. You can't sell a car here just because it's American, and if you want to design a car for the world you do it best in California."

The New Detroit?
AC Propulsion's Gage and Tesla's von Holzhausen were reluctant to identify themselves as part of a movement, part of a New Detroit. But Fisker, a Dane by birth, displays the real bravura about California's sense of place in the automotive future.

He says, "There's a spirit in California that anything is possible, that money is available if you have a great idea and are willing to take a risk. And yes, there is that feeling that California could become the second place in the U.S. where car development will thrive. The action is clearly in California right now. Quite a few companies are starting up, although not that many will survive."

But of those that do survive, how big are the prizes? Will one of these companies be the next General Motors? Fisker is plainly aware that for all his plans of six-figure sales, he hasn't built a car yet.

"I don't want to outline a whole huge plan because we have to get our first car on the road. But we've already planned our second car for significant volumes, a minimum of 100,000. I don't think there are any limits on how far we can go, and we have some investors behind us who think the same way, I'm Danish, I've lived in England, Germany and Switzerland and maybe in Europe we tend to put limits on ourselves. But not here. We're living in a land of endless opportunity."

Wall Street Journal Wrote:Even though Fisker Automotive Inc. is not hurting for cash, with more than $300 million in private funding and a $529 million federal loan, the hybrid electric car manufacturer is looking for funding from the old-school car manufacturers that many might think are its enemy.

Some say taking money from an established competitor with the stodgy old technology of an internal combustion engine is heresy for the new breed of electric vehicle makers. Kevin Czinger, chief executive of electric car start-up Coda Automotive Inc., in a recent interview with VentureWire questioned the true commitment such companies have to electric and alternative vehicles.

But, he added, one should never say never. Meanwhile, Tesla Motors Inc. recently signed a deal in which Toyota Motors Corp. may buy up to $50 million worth of Tesla shares, in another sign of the new school and the old school sharing the road.

As for Fisker, the maker of a plug-in hybrid sedan called the Karma, it is talking to some gas-engine automakers about investments, said Chief Executive Henrik Fisker in an interview on the sidelines of the Lazard Capital Markets Alternative Energy Summit in New York on Wednesday.

In an email exchange after the conference, Fisker said electric-vehicle companies could see several benefits from teaming up with traditional car companies, including partnerships around gasoline engines for future models (a gas engine developed by General Motors Corp. is already integrated into the Karma).

“Of course, joint volume in purchase of batteries, etc., is a cost advantage for both sides as well,” he said. “Other future joint development and plug-in hybrid specific platforms and production could also be a possibility.”

The traditional companies could also learn something from the upstarts, Fisker suggested. During a panel discussion at the conference, Fisker said his company has done a few things very differently in the design of its cars and in its manufacturing that cut “hundreds of millions of dollars” and years from the process of making a new car. “We have very low overhead and we can move extremely fast,” he added.

Fisker declined to say which automakers he’s talked to, though the company does have a relationship with GM from its use of GM’s engine. Fisker also has made an offer to buy one of GM’s unused factories in Wilmington, Del., and GM holds an equity stake in one of Fisker’s partners and investors, Quantum Fuel Systems Woldwide Inc.

Fisker has already pre-sold several thousand of its luxury Karma vehicles, with customers paying $5,000 each in down payments. The car, which sells for around $88,000, is now on a dealer tour, going through 45 dealerships in the U.S. and 50 in Europe.

Los Angeles Times Wrote:Coulomb Technologies plans to install 4,600 stations for free around the country, and California is slated to get about a third of them.

California will receive about a third of the 4,600 electric vehicle charging stations that Coulomb Technologies plans to install for free around the country.

The company, based in Campbell, Calif., will immediately start setting up public and private stations in Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Jose and the San Francisco Bay Area. The stations will also go up in Austin, Texas; Detroit; New York; Orlando, Fla.; Redmond, Wash.; and Washington.

More than 1,000 stations are scheduled to be installed by December, with the rest in place by September 2011.

Partnerships with major automakers mean that charging stations will be available in metropolitan areas where electric vehicles including the Chevrolet Volt, the Ford Transit Connect, the Ford Focus and the Smart Fortwo from Daimler will be sold.
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A wide network of charging stations is expected to help quell fears that future electric car owners won't be able to drive far beyond their home charging base.

The installations are part of a $37-million project called ChargePoint America, funded partly by a $15-million stimulus grant administered by the Department of Energy through the Transportation Electrification Initiative. Once the stations are in place, Purdue University and Idaho National Labs will analyze data about vehicle use and charging patterns.

At the end of last year, Coulomb already had 700 stations operating around the country.

tiffany.hsu@latimes.com