Danish designer and businessman Henrik Fisker has announced plans to launch a new car company named Fisker Inc. The brand will focus entirely on long-range electric vehicles in a bid to take on Tesla Motors, Porsche, and Mercedes-Benz, among others.
Fisker revealed that his namesake company’s first model will take the form of a large, luxurious sedan aimed directly at the Tesla Model S. The brand will preview the model with a slick-looking close-to-production concept fitted with a set of futuristic butterfly doors. The yet-unnamed production car will carry a base price of $65,000, though Fisker didn’t reveal when it will go on sale. In comparison, a Model S starts $66,000 before incentives are factored in.
Interestingly, Fisker’s sedan will benefit from a new, state-of-the-art battery pack that relies on graphene to offer more range and a longer service life. The pack will be developed in-house by a Fisker Inc. subsidiary Fisker Nanotech. The company’s ambitious hope is to achieve 400 miles of driving range, but additional technical details haven’t been made public yet.
Fisker Inc. isn’t stopping at a single model. Its second car will be a smaller sedan that will be similar in size and price to the Tesla Model 3 that’s scheduled to arrive next year. Like its bigger sibling, the entry-level sedan will offer a generous amount of range between charges thanks in part to a graphene battery pack.
Déjà vu?
If the name Fisker sounds familiar, it’s likely because the designer has tried to fight head-to-head against Tesla once before. He founded Fisker Automotive in 2007, but the plug-in hybrid Karma that company produced was less popular than expected and just 2,000 examples were built. Production stopped in 2012 after Fisker had burned through $1.4 billion of private investment and loans from the United States Department of Energy, according to Reuters.
The company finally collapsed and filed for bankruptcy in 2013, shortly after Fisker left. Its remains were purchased by China’s Wanxiang, who renamed the brand Karma and launched an updated version of Fisker’s only model,rechristened Revero, last August.
