Danish entrepreneur Henrik Fisker gears up for electric car comeback

Controversial car designer Henrik Fisker must have read the maxim “if at first you don’t succeed, then try, try again”.

Fisker has announced that he is launching another electric car company. This comes five years after the Danish entrepreneur put his hybrid car, the Karma, on sale for $102,000 (£80,000), and three years after the company went bust at a huge cost to US taxpayers.

Weeks after the Chinese bought Fisker’s assets out of bankruptcy, he unveiled a Karma Revero four-door hybrid that’s strikingly similar to the first one.

The firm’s called Fisker Inc, has plans for a high-end electric car as well as a mass-market model, and has nothing to do with Wanxiang, the Chinese giant that is now making the $130,000 Karma Revero.

It will, however, ring political alarm bells after Fisker’s first company, whose customers included Leonardo DiCaprio, Justin Bieber, Al Gore, and Colin Powell, lost over $1 billion, including a $139 million loan from the US Department of Energy.

Fisker, whose first car was once seen as a rival to Tesla, promises “a significantly longer battery life and range than any battery on the market”.