Can Fisker beat Tesla with state-of-the-art battery tech and butterfly doors?

By Ronan Glon October 21, 2016

Fisker sedan teaser

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.

Related Videos

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.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

News

Australia is building one of the world’s largest batteries using Tesla tech

best prime day battery deals 2020 batteries sale amazon

One of the challenges facing countries that want to change over from burning fossil fuels to more renewable energy sources is how to store energy. In Australia, the Victoria region currently relies on burning coal in power plants which produce energy throughout the days and seasons. But the state wants at least 50% of its power coming from renewable sources by 2030 -- and for that, it needs an energy infrastructure including a way to store energy produced by solar, wind, or other renewable sources, which may only work in certain conditions.

That's why Victoria is building one of the world's largest batteries, the Victorian Big Battery Megapack. The battery will be the size of a football field and will provide 450 megawatts-hours of storage with up to 300 megawatts of power output. That's double the size of the Hornsdale Power Reserve in South Australia, another giant battery made by the same company that made headlines in 2018.

News

Tesla’s new million-mile battery could finally make electric cars affordable

Tesla

Tesla plans to debut low-cost electric car batteries that can last up to a million miles and could make electric Tesla models the same price or even less than a car run by gasoline.

These low-cost batteries would first appear in Tesla’s Model 3 in China later this year or early 2021. Other markets, like North America, would follow after, according to an exclusive report from Reuters.

Cars

Giant new battery pack could give Tesla’s Model S 400-plus miles of range

tesla model s

Tesla engineers are working on a new, bigger battery pack that will put an end to range anxiety once and for all. The company hasn't announced concrete plans to give its cars a generous bump in range, but an eagle-eyed hacker named Jason Hughes shed light on what's secretly in the works by exploring recently-released firmware.

https://twitter.com/wk057/status/1230154980964937728