2023 Fisker Ocean on 2040-cars

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Why the $142M Fisker sale won't help DOE loan get its $168M back

At the beginning of 2014, it looked like Hybrid Tech Holdings LLC was going to buy the remains of Fisker Automotive for $25 million. Just before that sale was to take place, however, Wanxiang stepped in and an auction was therefore scheduled for the middle of February. After 19 rounds of apparently frantic bidding, Wanxiang drove away the winner with a $149.2-million bid. Despite the massive dollar run-up, the Department of Energy will not be recouping any extra money from its failed loan to Fisker in the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program. Way back in 2010, the DOE made Fisker a loan commitment of $528 million but only ever gave the automaker $192 million before problems were identified and the ATVMP spigot was turned off. The DOE later said it "recouped more than $28 million from the company's accounts," which left $168 million unaccounted for. The DOE thus announced it would hold an auction for the remainder of Fisker's loan obligation, which was decidedly not all of the Fisker remains. That loan sale auction took place in December and was won by Hybrid Tech Holdings for $25 million, which means that the final cost to the DOE was $143 million. The important thing to realize is that the $25 million in cash that made up Hybrid's original bid for the rest of the Fisker assets in the February auction in a Delaware bankruptcy court were the apples to the oranges of the $25 million used to buy the loan obligation in December. Since the DOE did not control - and never wanted to control - the Fisker assets, the DOE didn't get to recoup any more of the $143 million that Fisker owed on the loan despite the higher-than-expected ending price. Clear as mud, right?

New Fisker owner ready to go broke building EVs, challenging Tesla

Now this is the kind of fighting spirit we like to see. Lu Guanqiu is a Chinese billionaire who has visited the White House alongside Chinese president Hu Jintao in 2011. He's worth an estimated $3.1 billion. And he wants to take on Tesla Motors and other EV makers with his newly purchased company, Fisker Automotive. Lu is the chairman and founder of China's Wanxiang Group Corp., which bought Fisker for just under $150 million earlier this year. It also purchased battery supplier A123 Systems last year. Speaking to Bloomberg recently, Lu said that EV technology is at the top of his list of ways to go broke. "I'll put every cent that Wanxiang earns into making electric vehicles. I'll burn as much cash as it takes to succeed, or until Wanxiang goes bust," he said. Ahhh, inspiring. "I'll burn as much cash as it takes to succeed, or until Wanxiang goes bust" – Lu Guanqiu Exactly how and when new Fisker vehicles come to market - or if they'll even be Fiskers when they do – has been the subject of some debate. As part of the Fisker bankruptcy auction, Lu and Wanxiang now own an old, empty General Motors plant in Wilmington, DE. Lu told Bloomberg that Wanxiang has plans to first start building EVs, including the Karma plug-in hybrid, in the US (which suggests that restarting Karma production at Valmet is not going to happen) and to later build them in China. Right now, Lu's company only makes one type of electric vehicle: buses. Lu told Bloomberg he knows it will take a while to get his electric cars to market: "The road is still very long. We want to concentrate for now on manufacturing in the US. If I don't succeed, my son will continue with it. If he doesn't make it, my grandson will." Currently, emails sent to the "New Fisker" website are met with an automated response that promises a more personal touch later. It also says that the company is "very well funded and have a great plan to create a world class automotive company." That the new owner is ready to go broke doing so is not mentioned. You can read the New Fisker email and see a Bloomberg video on Lu below. Dear Fisker enthusiast, We at 'The New Fisker' would like to sincerely thank you for the email you sent via the website and greatly appreciate the time you have taken to reach out to the new company. The details of your correspondence are being reviewed by members of our devoted team, who are truly passionate about responding to you individually and personally.

Karma Automotive's next vehicle won't be the Atlantic, a coupe or a convertible, but it will be muscular

It's been a few months since we've gotten an update on what's happening at Karma Automotive. Since the car is here at the Detroit Auto Show, we stopped by and talked to Karma's TIm Oleston about where the company is and what's coming soon. Last fall, Karma was saying that its 550,000-square-foot factory in Moreno Valley, California would be up and running about now. But the timeline has turned into a more vague "some time in 2017," so we'll just have to wait for new about the start of actual production. Karma has run a few pre-production prototypes through the machines, and took 8-10 of them on a tour for prospective buyers in all the cities where the car will be sold (see the list here). On that tour, interested buyers were able to take the cars on test drives. "We wrung these cars out, in all kinds of weather," Oleston said, and none of them had a problem. We expect a spokesperson to give us the positive side of the story, but we'll take him at his word when he says that Karma engineers were expecting lots of problems, and were instead pleasantly surprised. The car itself remains pretty much the same as we're seen before, with 981 foot-pounds of torque and a top speed of about 128 miles an hour. Twenty-two-inch wheels are standard. The whole thing weighs about 5,400 pounds, so it's not going to win awards at the drag strip, but the more rigid chassis makes the Revero an excellent long-distance tourer, Oleston said, saying that he's spent thousands of miles behind the wheel. Oleston said that while the upcoming factory will be able to make more, if Karma sells about 2,000 Reveros, maybe 1,000 of them in the first year, that'd meet the company's expectations. As for the Karma model that's coming after the Revero, it will not be the Atlantic. Oleston said that the designers are working on "quite a few project," including ideas that take the "feline muscularity" of the Revero and crank it up a notch. Other than that, he would only hint at Karma's next model: "It's not a coupe, it's not a convertible. That's all I should say right now." More information will be coming in a few years, he said. The Revero's infotainment is getting a major overhaul. We knew this, and that it will have Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. You can see more in the video below. This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings.