Henrik Fisker quits plug-in car company he founded!

The Company will need a LOT of Karma from now on......

 

Like their water-soaked cars, these guys have been toast for a long time, unfortunately.

 

I read somewhere it is due to the sale to the Chinese?

 

so pretty expensive battery, in line what auto execs have been realistically saying for a while and what optimistic people thought was nowhere real price.

 

Fisker went to the bankruptcy court to stop JCI from taking over to A123. It was fiskers action that helped hand the company to Wanxiang against congressional objections. That looks like a very bad move on their part now.

 

It has a 20kWh battery, that is $14500/20 = $725 per kWh. Ooch!

 

That is for very small quantities. Note it was going to drop to $650/kwh after quantities picked up, to 5000 units. Around $650/kwh was the rumored price gm was paying for the first year volt batteries when quantities were promised around 10,000. After selling over 20,000 units last year and a new less expensive chemistry, we expect that the price has dropped. Nissan and tesla with larger quantities are even lower. Ford appears to be getting a deal on the panasonics that are also in the prius phv, but details of that deal have not been disclosed. Panasonic did take a large write down of their lithium business because of lack of volume before the ford deal.

As for $15K part being a killer on a $100,000 car, that doesn't appear to be the case. The problems have been the quality of these cars so far. Why not get a tesla instead? I don't have much simpathy for Fisker. It was a highly risky venture, and he seemed to have screwed tesla on his design work before starting up. He'll do fine as a car designer, just not as a company owner.

 

This is rather common. The guy who starts the business probably has an engineering or design background. This may work at first but eventually the company gets big enough that he sells out and loses control to accountants and managers who don't know a dam thing about the product.

Ransom Olds founded a 2nd car company after he left his first. He also lost the use of his name so he used his initials, REO,

McDonald lost control of his hamburger business and only his original restaurant could carry his name. All those other McDonald's were Kroc's.