Turning the tide

A decade ago, Henrik Fisker’s brave foray into electrification ended in glorious failure. Now the designer is back with his Ocean SUV and sure of success.

- Steve Cropley

Henrik Fisker’s idea of a decent hotel breakfast is three fried eggs on a large plate, sunny side up. This much I discovered when I met the Danish-born, Californian-based EV entrepreneur in a Park Lane hotel last week – right before he jumped on a flight to Austria to review 47 Fisker Ocean prototypes that his Graz-based manufacturing partner, Magna Steyr, had just finished building. After that, he was off to Barcelona, Spain, where the Ocean was making its European debut at the Mobile World Conference.

Our time together was necessarily short, but what struck me was how efficiently Fisker could eat and talk at the same time – which seemed a neat metaphor for the speed-to-market philosophy that he believes will make his all-new £35,000 electric SUV successful when it goes on sale before the end of this year in five mainland European markets and the US, and then in the UK during 2023.

Even this breakneck progress with the Ocean is very far from the end of the Fisker Inc story, it turns out. Fisker wants to have launched four EV models by the end of 2025, and they won’t be what he dismisses as “sausage” models, resembling one another closely, but firmly distinctive designs aimed at disparate parts of the model matrix.

However, the Ocean is the pioneer in all this. It has been created and brought to the start of production in just over two years, specifically to minimise the time lag that usually affects the implementation of digital technology in cars, compared with much faster progress in the sphere of communications equipment.