2023 Fisker Ocean on 2040-cars

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Fisker Pear shows up in L.A. in video and pics

With the Fisker Ocean running down production lines at Magna's plant in Graz, Austria, Henrik Fisker has decided to let the Pear out the play. The Fisker Pear will be the second car introduced to the lineup, expected to happen sometime around late 2024. The CEO said he was going to take it out for a drive in L.A., and someone caught the hatchback crossing the new 6th Street Viaduct Bridge last Friday morning. This week, a prototype dressed in the same camouflage and bright green 22-inch Slipstream wheels was caught parked in an L.A. alley, giving us an even better look.  This one's dubbed a battery-electric city car for a global audience, its name an acronym for Personal Electric Automotive Revolution. Said to challenge cars like the Volkswagen ID.3 in international markets, the Pear is actually sized like a subcompact crossover. Length is given as 4.55 meters or 179.1 inches. That's 12 inches longer than the ID.3, 9.5 inches longer than the Chevrolet Bolt EUV, half an inch longer than the 2024 Chevy Trax. A series of patent application drawings at Fiskerati give glimpses into novel features, one of them being a drawer that emerges from the front fascia, the other being a hatch that partially disappears into the bumper. The steel chassis debuting with the Pear will eventually support two more vehicles. That platform can hold one of two batteries on offer, one for local city duty, and a Hyper Range pack with an estimated 310 miles of range. Fisker has announced a price of $29,900 for the base version with the smaller battery, but we imagine it's going to be hard to hold the line on that until the Pear goes on sale. The key to making it work is keeping the parts count low, and maximizing manufacturing efficiency. The automaker hired a production exec from BMW's South Carolina facility to oversee plans at the Foxconn facility where the Pear will be built, the target being 250,000 per year by 2025. Fisker wants the Pear to get Fisker Automotive to 1 million sales by 2027. Last we heard, Fisker said it had 5,000 reservations for the little guy. Now that it's out and about, we should see and learn more soon.

Fisker fills in more details on the electric Ocean crossover

With two years go to before Fisker commences deliveries of the all-electric Ocean crossover, we're in for many months of piecemeal updates. The fledgling California automaker has released another smattering of details after debuting the Ocean at this month's Consumer Electronics Show, helping to fill in some functional aspects. At 182.7 inches long, 76 inches wide, and 63.6 inches high, the Fisker is 0.6 inches taller than the Ford Mustang Mach-E, 3.3 inches shorter in overall length, and two inches wider. The dimensions translate into 20 cubic feet of cargo room with the rear seats up and the parcel shelf installed, 25 cu. ft. without the parcel shelf, and 45 cu. ft. with the shelf out and rear seats down. At the other end of the interior, the instrument cluster is 9.8 inches, and the infotainment screen is a 16-inch vertically-oriented unit with haptic feedback. In between, designers did their best to source eco-friendly materials to create a "vegan interior." The Dinamica seating surfaces are derived from old T-shirts, polyester fibers, and recycled plastic, with reinforced rayon backing. The carpet comes from recycled nylon taken from discarded fishing gear. Fisker also says it will recycle rubber waste created during the Ocean's production. The standard wheels come in 20-inch sizes, with 22-inchers on the options sheet. Roof rails and a tow hitch will be options, too, but we'll need to wait another year to find out towing capacity. Turns out the announced entry price for $37,499 is for a base model that doesn't benefit from all-wheel drive, meaning it also doesn't get the more-than-300-horsepower powertrain. When we covered the reveal, we wrote, "Fisker quoted between 250 and 300 miles of driving range depending on driving conditions," so it's possible the base model notches 300 miles while the AWD version comes in closer to 250 miles. The Ocean gets an 80-kWh battery pack. For comparison, there's a 20-mile range delta between RWD and AWD versions of the Mach-E with the Standard Range 75.7-kWh battery pack. A high-performance Ocean will get a larger pack, targeting acceleration to 60 miles per hour in under three seconds, a fair chunk faster than the 3.5-second sprint for the Tesla Model Y Performance. Details on that model won't come until 2021. At some point this year, tire kickers will be able to explore the Ocean in person at Fisker experience centers, and set up test drives through a mobile app due next year.

Henrik Fisker opens up about EVs

Danish car designer Henrik Fisker is an interesting figure in the automotive world. After heading up design at Aston Martin he created the initial design for the Tesla Model S before launching Fisker Automotive. There, he created the Karma range-extended electric sports car. As we all know, the company eventually went bankrupt, leaving Mr. Fisker's future in question. Now he's back on the scene with his $230,000 supercar, the VLF Force 1, which debuted at the 2016 North American International Auto Show in Detroit. Interestingly the V10-powered Force 1, along with VLF's V8-powered Destino, is a huge departure from the green machines for which Fisker was responsible not too long ago. If that makes you curious as to what's going on inside the talented head of Henrik Fisker, you're not alone. Thankfully, Fisker has opened up to Tech Insider, discussing his thoughts on EVs and the future of the automotive world. While Fisker was part of the EV revolution – in his words, showing that "electric cars can be beautiful and exciting and fun to drive" – mass adoption has been slower than he originally predicted. The field is still too limited, with not much available in terms of what people want to buy. The driving range, too, is a huge obstacle to EV uptake, but that is slowly improving. "The choice for consumers is still fairly limited, but in my mind there's no doubt electric cars are here to stay," says Fisker. "It is going to be a growing segment and it will continue to grow." Fisker, however, is bearish on hybrids, despite their popularity. In his opinion, "electric cars will take over a lot of hybrids quicker than people think now." In an interesting prediction that defies more commonly held beliefs, hybrids don't have a place as a transition to EVs anymore. As infrastructure grows – along with battery capacity – people will "jump straight from gas to electric rather than make the transition to hybrid which is what a lot of car companies are betting on." It's an interesting point of view, to be sure, especially coming from a man who just recently took a pretty big leap from electric cars back to supercars whose fury is fed by fossil fuels. Take a deeper look into the mind of Henrik Fisker in the piece from Tech Insider. Related Video: