Luxury car designer Henrik Fisker is back in Orange County.
Real estate brokerage data indicates that his Fisker Inc. (NYSE: FSR), an electric vehicle upstart valued around $2.8 billion as of last week, signed a 78,980-square-foot lease for a light manufacturing building in La Palma.
The property, at 14 Centerpointe Drive, runs nearly the same size as Fisker’s Manhattan Beach headquarters.
The company is expected to move in this October and started some construction last month. The La Palma building will be used for research and development, sources tell the Business Journal.
Fisker Inc. had 455 global employees as of May and anticipates reaching 800 by end of this year.
The local building is located at Centerpointe La Palma, a 10-building business park just north of the Artesia (91) Freeway, along Valley View Street.
The complex is owned by Irvine-based Greenlaw Partners, which bought the site for about $106 million in a venture with New York-based Westbrook Partners in 2017, according to property records.
Karma Ties
This marks the first reported OC location for the EV maker, which was founded in 2016 and went public in 2020 via a reverse merger with a SPAC.
Founder and Chief Executive Henrik Fisker previously headed OC’s Fisker Automotive, maker of a luxury hybrid vehicle known as the Fisker Karma. The company went bankrupt in 2013 after it was unable to pay back a large government loan; its assets were sold to a China-backed firm now with local operations in Irvine and called Karma Automotive.
Ocean One Awaits
The reborn Fisker Inc. plans to make vehicles much more affordable than the Fisker Karma, which had a price well over $100,000.
Preorders for reservation holders of the Fisker Ocean One opened on July 1, with a limit of 5,000 vehicles. Production is confirmed to begin in November 2022 and the launch vehicle starts at $68,999.
The company reported vehicle reservations had reached over 45,000 as of May, including 1,600 fleet reservations. According to Fisker, this could result in revenue of $2.5 billion.
Its second vehicle in the wings is the Fisker Pear with reservations already over 2,500. A third unit in the works has been codenamed “Project Ronin.’
Romeo Power
Alongside Karma Automotive, Irvine’s Rivian Automotive Inc. (Nasdaq: RIVN) and Brea’s Mullen Automotive Inc. (Nasdaq: MULN), OC is seeing an influx of EV businesses snap up large facilities (see story, page 3).
EV battery maker Romeo Power Inc. (NYSE: RMO) is making a local move from Vernon to its new corporate headquarters in Cypress; the company recently reported the first phase of the move was completed in March. The 191,000-square-foot industrial space will house both the headquarters and a manufacturing floor for the company, which promises to bring “hundreds of jobs” to OC, officials said.
