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IPFS News Link • Energy

Does It Matter If Electric Car Maker Fisker Fails?

• Kevin Bullis via TechnologyReview.com

Last night, Fisker Automotive, maker of the luxury Karma electric vehicle, unveiled its new car, the Atlantic, which was previously known as Project Nina. The car, which is expected to cost about half as much as the Karma—or around $50,000—is meant to make the company a mass-market automaker.

But there are strong doubts about whether the company will bring the car to market, and if it does, whether the car will be built in the United States as originally intended. The company had been counting on a U.S. Department of Energy loan to build a factory for manufacturing the car, but those funds were frozen after Fisker failed to meet milestones specified by the terms of the loan.

In addition to losing access to the approximately $300 million it had yet to draw from its DOE loan, the company has had a number of other setbacks recently. Those include the failure of the Karma that Consumer Reports was testing, which turned out to the result of a bad battery pack from A123 Systems. A123 Systems is now replacing the battery packs in about 700 Karma sedans.

 

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