This Is Fisker’s New Tesla-Fighting Electric Car
It goes 400 miles on a charge—and has a double set of butterfly doors.
It's a common misconception, but Henrik Fisker’s new electric sedan does not have gullwing doors. Those are butterfly doors, like the ones on the Mclaren F1. Yes, there are two sets of them. And yes, they are gorgeous—just like everything else we can see of the new Tesla-fighting electric car.
The image, which was released on designer-turned-carmaker Henrik Fisker’s official Twitter account on Thursday, depicts a sleek, coupe-like four-door that, to our eyes, vaguely resembles a cross between the Porsche Mission E and the Infiniti Q60. (We’ve fiddled with the image in Photoshop a bit below to bring out some of the details.)
According to Business Insider, Fisker revealed a few additional details about the new car in a letter sent out to select members of the media. (Hey Fisker: Why we had to learn about this from Business Insider, we’d like to know.) The sedan will be built primarily out of aluminum and carbon fiber, and will offer a roomier interior than “its closest competitor”—i.e. the Tesla Model S.
Fisker has gone on record declaring Elon Musk’s electric car company is the primary target for his new EV endeavor.
"I think it's pretty clear when you look at the market, when you look at the premium market, there's really only one company that is out there, and it's Tesla," he told Business Insider last week.
But the Fisker Inc. sedan could be the first production EV to give the Model S a serious run for its money. According to BI, the new car will use cutting-edge graphene supercapacitors in lieu of the lithium-ion batteries used by most modern electric cars. That high-tech energy storage should give the sedan a range of 400 miles or more when it arrives in 2017, BI reports.
The car pictured here will be on the expensive side; Fisker told BI that it should cost about as much as a top-tier Model S, so figure a price tag of around $100,000. But Fisker, Inc.—the company Henrik has created to develop his new electric vehicles—reportedly intends to follow this car with a mass-market vehicle even cheaper than the Tesla Model 3 or the Chevrolet Bolt.
Don’t confuse the new sedan with the Karma, Fisker’s original Tesla-fighting luxury sedan; the rights to the car were snapped up by a Chinese company, which intends to return it to production in modified form as the Karma Revero.
Fisker says we can expect to see more of the car next week. Considering how much this one shot has set our hearts a-flutter...consider us excited.
Update, 4:20pm: Fisker actually just sent us the email with the picture of the car, soooooo...sorry 'bout the 'tude, guys.
