Henrik Fisker Returns, Claims His New Electric Vehicle Will Blow Your Mind

Guess who’s back?

Henrik Fisker, the designer-turned-entrepreneur behind the ill-fated Fisker Karma, wants to try his hand at building a green luxury vehicle again.

The Dane wants to erase the cloud of failure that hangs over his name by building a new electric car with a Tesla-beating range, Bloomberg reports. Naturally, his name is all over the new company. In fact, it is the company.

Fisker, Inc. plans to unveil a vehicle in the second half of 2017 that draws impressive range from its shadowy battery technology, Fisker claims. The batteries will reportedly come from Fisker Nanotek, a private corporation based in northern California.

The fledgling automaker’s chairman and CEO told Bloomberg:

“We have really been working in stealth mode. For the last two years I have been looking at battery technologies and wanted to see if there was something that could really give us a new paradigm. We had the strategy of developing the technology as fast as possible without getting tied down to a large organization, which would hold us back. Now we have the technology that nobody else has. And there is nobody even close to what we are doing out there.”

Quite bragadocious, as a certain presidential candidate would say. Fisker calls the unnamed vehicle the “spiritual successor” to the Karma, which landed with a glitzy splash in 2012 before quickly sinking to the bottom of the pool. The company’s assets were sold off to a Chinese firm in 2014, with the current (unaffiliated) Karma Automotive LLC rising from those ashes.

The company isn’t dishing all the details on its ace-in-the-hole technology just yet. Fisker Nanotek CEO Jack Kavanaugh claims the technology draws from the work of a group of UCLA professors. The batteries aren’t conventional lithium-ion units, Kavanaugh says, though they do contain some lithium.

“We have already developed prototypes that you won’t see anywhere else,” he told Bloomberg.

The new technology reportedly gives the new vehicle a range of 400 miles. Production will take place at Fisker Nanotek’s manufacturing facility, with photos expected to be released closer to the middle of next year.

Fisker wouldn’t say if any remnants of the former Karma would find its way into the new vehicle, nor what the car will look like. The executive only claims that the vehicle will be attractive and very spacious, and will contain some of his signature design elements.

[Image: TEDxChapmanU/ Flickr ( CC BY-ND-NC 2.0)]