Fisker to Receive $528.7 Million Federal Loan
By JIM MOTAVALLI
The Fisker Karma.Only four automakers are recipients of the Department of Energy’s $25 billion Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program to encourage the domestic manufacture of batteries and battery cars, and two of them produce high-performance plug-in sports cars.
Fisker Automotive and Tesla Motors are members of that exclusive club, along with Ford and Nissan from the old guard. The Fisker loan, $528.7 million to develop its Karma sports sedan and a less expensive family-size plug-in hybrid car (called Project Nina), was announced on Wednesday. The first Karmas will be built late this year in Finland, but the plant for the Project Nina car will be in the United States. The Energy Department said that its investment would “save or create” 5,000 jobs.
In a telephone interview, Henrik Fisker, founder and chief executive, said that the current Karma would stay in Finland, but its successor could be built in the United States with the Nina vehicle (which will appear in late 2012). Fisker projects annual Karma sales at 16,000 and Nina sales at more than 100,000 (the Energy Department press release says 75,000 to 100,000).
Mr. Fisker said that as much as 60 percent of Nina production could be exported, especially to Europe. “Designing cars that can appeal to Europeans has been a weakness of the American car industry,” he said. And it’s a problem that the Denmark-born Fisker, a former designer for BMW (who also had Tesla as a client) said he had solved. The Nina, he said, will offer “radical” styling that will “open up a completely new segment in terms of its size.” He would not elaborate.
Mr. Fisker said that the world had a “hunger” for the environmental benefits and extended range offered by plug-in hybrid cars. He said the public was less willing to accept “the compromise of pure battery cars, which suffer from range anxiety and the ‘walk-home factor.’”
The agency loan is in two stages, with the first $169.3 million to be used for what Mr. Fisker called “final testing and certification” of the Karma at the company’s Pontiac, Mich., plant (with support from company headquarters in Irvine, Calif.). The second stage, $359.36 million, is to gear up for manufacture of the Nina in the United States.
An Energy Department spokeswoman, who asked not to be identified, said in an interview that Fisker’s “two projects seemed to be worth the risk of the loan,” because they would create “a large number of jobs in America.” She said that Fisker had “marks it needs to hit before we commit to the loan. When the conditions are met, the loan goes out the door.”
She later said there was no deadline for the conditions to be met. Mr. Fisker said that those conditions were worked out in months of discussions with the agency. “It’s similar to a loan we might get from a bank and it’s not a problem,” he said. “The D.O.E. wants us to be successful.”
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