Henrik Fisker paired up with Hong Kong billionaire Richard Li to get his company back. Fisker is a co-founder of severely troubled Fisker Automotive. Li and Fisker are trying to buy the U.S. government loan to Fisker at a big discount. Henrik Fisker was ousted in March.

Another group, China’s Wanxiang with Bob Lutz as a friendly face, is trying to buy Fisker for $20 million.

Around Fisker Automotive hangs a $171 million loan payable to the DOE. The DOE is currently looking into the legal ramifications of selling the loan, Reuters heard. Last month, the DOE seized $21 million from Fisker’s bank account to apply against the first priority loan. Then, there are payables to suppliers.

Just-Auto recently wrote, and I wholeheartedly agree:

“As any rational person in the industry understands, the odds of any automaking start-up succeeding in the long run are about the equivalent of winning the national lottery: it could, statistically, happen, but in reality, it almost certainly won’t. In fact, you might say that starting a firm to make automobiles in hopes of building the company into a global brand is a task mostly for masochists and the deluded.”

 

Most of our readers probably already know the broad strokes of the Fisker story. If you’re interested in the finer details of the history of the extended range EV company that appears to be circling the drain, GigaOM, a site that covers the investment side of tech companies, has published a fairly comprehensive 4,000 word look back at Fisker by Katie Fehrenbacher.

While the ~$200 million that Fisker received in Dept. of Energy loans has gotten a bit of attention, that’s only a small fraction of the $1 billion plus that the EV startup burned through since 2007. The bulk of that money came from venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins as well as private investors.

Fehrenbacher’s been covering Fisker from the beginning and for this article she conducted a dozen recent interviews with individuals at the heart of the Fisker story. The focus is primarily on the financing, but she also goes into Fisker’s business model for building cars, like the curious fact that the company paid up front for 15,000 cars’ worth of components from suppliers, though it only assembled about 2,000 Karmas.

They also apparently paid BMW at least something in advance for the engines Fisker was going to be using on its second model, the Nina/Atlantic, though production on that car wasn’t going to start for years. Fehrenbacher also described the company as top heavy with experienced auto industry executives, many of them highly compensated refugees from Detroit.

As they say, read the whole thing here.

Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, a realistic perspective on cars & car culture and the original 3D car site. If you found this post worthwhile, you can dig deeper at Cars In Depth. If the 3D thing freaks you out, don’t worry, all the photo and video players in use at the site have mono options. Thanks for reading – RJS

Henrik Fisker has resigned from the automobile firm that bears his name, as the company’s future looks to be headed towards an inexorable buyout by a Chinese auto maker.

Fisker sent an email to Automotive News outlining his decision to resign

“The main reasons for his resignation are several major disagreements that Henrik Fisker has with the Fisker Automotive executive management on the business strategy.”

Comments by Fisker CEO Tony Posawatz seemed to confirmed that Fisker was negotiating with a Chinese partner, likely Geely, to take over the auto maker. Fisker is looking for additional funding to help launch their second model, the smaller Atlantic sedan.