It is the second major bankruptcy for Henrik Fisker: Once again, a start-up by the former car designer has gone bankrupt, this time it is the company that bears his last name. For weeks there have been rumors about the final end for Fisker, and on Monday evening the company filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11 of the US bankruptcy law in the state of Delaware.
Henrik Fisker wanted to position his brand as a major Tesla challenger and promoted the sustainability of his electric SUV called Oceanwhich has been available to buy since last year. The model was manufactured in Austria by Magna, but problems kept cropping up. Fisker had to keep revising its production figures downwards, and in March Magna stopped production altogether. The result was disastrous: Last year, Fisker built around 10,200 vehicles and delivered 4,929 of them to customers. The plan was actually to deliver four times as many.
The software of the vehicles also caused problems again and again, a well-known car tester said in a video that the Fisker Ocean was the worst car he had ever driven. Because the revenue from car sales was not coming in, the start-up was slowly running out of money. At the end of February, Fisker warned that without fresh money, the company’s existence was in danger. The last hope was negotiations with a large car manufacturer, according to insiders it was Nissan. But in March the talks failed, the share price plummeted, and the New York Stock Exchange suspended trading in Fisker shares. From this point on, many experts believed bankruptcy was only a matter of time.
Other electric car companies are also in the red, such as Rivian or Lucid. But investors are currently pumping in enough money so that the companies can continue to operate. Henrik Fisker had already failed with an electric car start-up in 2013; before that, he had worked as a car designer at BMW and Aston Martin, among others.