Fisker not averse to collaboration with others

Last week, Fisker Inc. CEO Henrik Fisker declared he is exploring collaboration with other companies to scale up market share faster, speaking at the Reuters Automotive Conference in Munich. During interviews at the conference, senior executives of other EV makers, Polestar and Smart, said they are open to partnerships to address supply chain and technology challenges.

“Buyers aren’t loyal anymore to their traditional brands,” Fisker reiterated. “That changes everything. If we collaborate with someone, you can scale quicker… It could be with suppliers, other car companies, tech companies; we are exploring all these avenues,” Fisker added.

He repeated that his EV start-up has 65 000 reservations for its first product, the Ocean SUV, launched a few weeks ago. He reaffirmed a target of producing 1 400 to 1 700 Ocean EVs this quarter. The company cut its full-year production forecast for the Ocean earlier this month, but Fisker said last week that problems securing a part of the Ocean’s interior had been resolved.

Pear is next

Fisker’s next model, the US-built Pear, will start at $29 990 and will be shown for the first time on the 3rd of August in Los Angeles, Fisker added. As already known, he plans to have the model assembled by contract manufacturer Foxconn at a factory in Ohio.

The Pear will have 25% fewer parts than a comparable car today, but the company is not following Tesla’s use of large cast parts to cut production costs. “We didn’t want three giant mega-castings,” Fisker pointed out, “and put customers at risk of having to scrap their cars after an accident. So instead, we will build vehicles from steel, combining multiple parts into one using single stampings.”

Political decisions

In the future, Fisker hopes to have a production capacity in Europe, China, the United States, and India. So after the Pear, more Fisker models will come, but they will be far more upmarket.

Fisker insists he is not planning its production strategy around government incentives, such as the US Inflation Reduction Act or other subsidy schemes. “You cannot react after some politicians, he scorns. “They feel like doing something this year, and it changes again in four years. One cannot plan a business like ours on these ever-changing promises.”