Fisker claims it has 1,500 reservations for an EV it has not even shown to buyers

Fisker received about 1,500 reservations within days for its second electric vehicle, the Pear, which has not been shown and will not be delivered until 2024, CEO Henrik Fisker said.

"We already started taking reservations on that mainly because we have some interest from some large rental car companies," Fisker told Automotive News Europe in a video chat from London. "I also felt it was important to allow private people to make a reservation because we had a lot of people asking for it."

The Pear, or the Personal Electric Automotive Revolution, is a five-passenger EV aimed at younger consumers.

The Danish-American car designer’s second EV company has taken deposits for the Pear -- which will start at about $30,000 in the U.S. -- from customers in part because battery suppliers have been burned by car manufacturers making overly optimistic sales projections for early plug-in models.

“Normally, a car company does due diligence of a supplier,” Fisker told Bloomberg in a separate interview Wednesday in London. “Now, the battery makers are actually doing the diligence on the carmakers, and of course also the startups, and saying: ‘Hold on a minute, we need to see the business model, we need to see the car, we need to believe in you.’ ”

Fisker, 58, founded his first eponymous company in 2007. Fisker Automotive began delivering its only sports car, the Karma plug-in hybrid, at a time when Tesla’s only model on the market was the Roadster. Fisker Automotive went bankrupt in late 2013 after its sole battery supplier went bust.

The designer of BMW and Aston Martin luxury cars bounced back to form Fisker in 2016 and took it public in 2020 via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company.

He said that since going public Fisker has raised more than $1.6 billion.

"That is enough to get our Fisker Ocean to market and start some other programs," he told ANE, adding that two key lessons learned from his previous experience were the importance of "having captial and the right partnerships with the right suppliers."

He single out Fisker's relationships with Magna International's manufacturing arm, Magna Steyr, which will build the car in Graz, Austria, and Chinese battery maker CATL.

He said Fisker's contract with CATL has a provision that allow the company to increase production with 12 months' notice.

"They have 65 gigawatt hours and we have 5 gWh out of that so we are a pretty good size customer," Fisker said.

The company has taken more than 32,000 reservations for its first EV, the Ocean SUV, which Fisker plans to start delivering to customers in November. In Europe the Ocean will be available in Scandanavia first, then in the UK and the rest of Europe next year, Fisker said. 

Fisker was in London before heading to Graz, where Magna Steyr has 47 Ocean prototypes in various stages of pre-production, he said. The companies plan to make roughly 45,000 of the SUVs next year.

By the end of this year, Fisker expects to have at least 50,000 reservations. The company has enlisted Foxconn Technology Group to manufacture the Pear in Ohio, and batteries will be sourced from a factory in the U.S., Fisker said.

Douglas A. Bolduc and Bloomberg contributed