Henrik Fisker wouldn’t have blamed you for calling him crazy seven years ago.
He left a cushy job at Ford Motor Co. during boom times to develop a luxury hybrid car without a big automaker as a backer.
And that was before Al Gore made everything related to “green” mainstream.
It turned out to be a case of convenient timing for Fisker, who, along with colleagues Bernhard Koehler and Alan Niedzwiecki, was honored at the Business Journal’s annual Excellence in Entrepreneurship award luncheon held March 18 at the Hyatt Regency Irvine.
The trio running Irvine’s Fisker Automotive Inc. is set to deliver a plug-in electric luxury sedan later this year. They have 32 dealers signed on to sell their Karma sedan across the U.S. The cars are set to sell for $87,500 to $120,000.
Fisker Automotive has created a buzz,the company’s raised nearly $100 million from investors.
The interest surrounding Fisker Automotive is a sharp contrast to the problems going on at Ford, which was about $26 billion in debt at the end of 2008.
Fisker, who was born in Denmark, is candid about his decision to leave Ford, where he was director of the automaker’s Global Advanced Design Studio, responsible for the design of Aston Martin DB9. Earlier in his career, he designed the BMW Z3 of James Bond fame.
“I want to say I had a crystal ball and saw it wouldn’t be as cushy in a couple of years after all,” Fisker said. “Honestly, it was a situation where we wanted to have some change in the auto industry and had to make a decision to either follow the rules in these huge companies or venture out on our own.”
Koehler
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Karma: 32 dealers signed on to sell luxury car |
Enter German-born Koehler, a fellow Ford man, who joined Fisker when he decided to leave his Ford life and job security behind.
“Barney (Koehler) and I had talked about the future of the auto industry a lot when we were at Ford, but really had nothing but our combined expertise when we left Ford,” Fisker said.
So they started pooling their expertise over a cup of coffee and ended up with the rough design of a car.
“We sat down the first day out of the job and asked each other what we should do now,” Fisker said. “So we decided to get a cup of coffee at a Starbucks in Irvine and designed a car that same day.”
The two started predecessor company Fisker Coachbuild in January 2005 with plans to design two ultra-luxury sports cars and sell about 150 of them to the super rich.
Fisker Coachbuild planned to buy existing technology and concentrate on the aesthetics of its limited-edition vehicles,nothing close to Fisker’s current plans to have 100,000 Fiskers on the road by 2016.
Niedzwiecki
It was Canadian-born Niedzwiecki who changed the pair’s plans. Or more accurately, Niedzwiecki’s wife.
Niedzwiecki is chief executive of Irvine-based Quantum Fuel Systems Technologies Worldwide Inc., which owns the Q-Drive, the power train,the engine, transmission, and other parts of the car,that is going into Fisker’s cars.
Niedzwiecki’s wife played tennis with Fisker’s wife and brought the pair together for a lunch at Maggiano’s in Costa Mesa. The conversation clicked from the get go, Niedzwiecki said.
“We talked about building cars in China, here in Orange County and hybrids in general over lunch and a little into dinner,” he said.
Quantum had been developing the Q-Drive power train for the military and was doing work for other big automakers dabbling in hybrid technology.
“Henrik and I saw the (auto) industry headed for a brick wall and we couldn’t wait any longer for others to come out with these vehicles to drive a real change in the industry,” Niedzwiecki said. “So we hired an investment banker, put a plan together and started to raise the seed capital for the company.”
That’s how a Dane, German and Canadian decided to start an American auto company.
Fisker Automotive also is developing a sports car, the Sunset, which, like the Karma, runs off a combination electric and rechargeable battery engine.
The company recently made its first round of announcements about dealers, which include Irvine-based Shelly Automotive Group, which was one of the first investors in Fisker Coachbuild; Sullivan Automotive Group in Beverly Hills; and Oregon-based Ron Tonkin Family of Dealerships.
Thirty-two retailers were confirmed as of last week, putting the automaker close to its goal of having more than 40 dealerships across the world.
It has been a long road to this point for the company that started out with the reputation of its founders, an idea and little else.
“From the very beginning we have known this is the right thing and that is why we have put all our efforts and personal power into this, because there is no reverse in life,” Fisker said. “You can only go forward even when it’s tough and difficult.”
It would have been easy for Fisker to end up like the many failed startup automakers that litter history. But, Fisker said, the trio had something different.
“There are many reasons these other startup companies failed,” Fisker said. “Because at the end of the day, everyone had only come up with another car that had a gasoline engine. There wasn’t enough for the customer to take a risk and buy from a completely new brand.”
Other Cars
Fisker also noted that these former startups committed the auto industry cardinal sin of taking on massive debt to build the manufacturing plants before they even had models to build.
Instead, Fisker has enlisted Finnish custom automaker Valmet Automotive OY to produce the cars. Valmet also does Porsche AG’s Boxster and Cayman models.
Fisker also is contemplating creating a lower-cost, smaller, plug-in car,appealing to Prius buyers,if it gets a loan the company has applied for with the Department of Energy.
The company wants to build a family-oriented version of the Karma before going forward with the cheaper small car. But Fisker said he’d like to get the Karma on the road first.
“We can’t say too much about that yet, because we’re concentrating on launching the car first and foremost,” he said. “But we’re still planning for the future.”
The company already has dealt with fickle investors and a lawsuit from a rival automaker.
San Carlos-based Tesla Motors Inc., which early on planned to work with Fisker, has spent the past few years trading lawsuits with the company.
In December, a retired judge ruled in favor of Fisker in an arbitration hearing.
“We learned you’re really not successful until someone has sued you, because that shows you have something that is worth something,” Koehler said.
Its investors would agree.
The automaker has raised nearly $94 million after three rounds of funding.
“Alan and I thought we would have to go around the world to get someone to invest,” Fisker said. “Yet the first investor we met with in San Francisco gave us money pretty quickly because everyone understood we really had something.”
Well, not everyone.
Fisker said he met with one representative of a venture capital firm who was completely on board. But when the representative brought it to his board, directors disagreed.
“The head guy from venture funding company actually quit after the committee decided not to invest with us,” Fisker said. “He gave us a personal check for $5,000 and then preordered the car on the spot, because that’s how impressed he was.”
