Hybrid-electric car maker Fisker has officially changed hands, as China-based company Wanxiang Group won with a US$ 149 million bid. And while that translates to a colossal Dhs 550,000,000, we’re only hoping this will get the company back on its feet and back into production.
Last month, Fisker Automotive’s executive chairman, Henrik Fisker, resigned from the company. Now the electric-car maker is preparing for a potential bankruptcy.
The exclusive dealer for Fisker in the GCC has just announced that the first Fisker Karmas have been delivered to customers in the UAE, while the news from Fisker at the factory is that production has been halted for now.
Fisker as a carmaker has a bit of a checkered past. The American company was co-founded by a former Danish car designer who penned certain BMW and Aston Martin sports cars a decade ago, and then started peddling rebodied BMW coupes under the Fisker banner back in 2005. In 2008, they came up with a concept electric car so ridiculous that no one thought it’d get any further than the auto-show floor. After missing various deadlines, taking government loans and beating a Tesla lawsuit, the Fisker Karma beat all odds by finally hitting production in the summer of 2011.
Ah, the Fisker Karma, quite possibly the most interesting car we’ll ever drive, until electric cars become commonplace here. We snagged a second round with the Fisker Karma for about half a day. While we’d already driven the car in a controlled event, this time we got to really drive it.
In a move that no one expected, the Fisker Karma just became the first plug-in electric car to officially go on sale in the Middle East. Mitsubishi briefly thought about making an entry here with the i-MiEV, while Chevrolet has a couple of Volts running around Dubai since last year for so-called tests that never seem to end. But the upstart brand Fisker managed to come to market first, with a launch event held in the UAE.
In a surprise move, the Dubai-based Al Futtaim Group has announced that they will be the exclusive dealers for the Fisker line of electric cars in various GCC and Middle East countries. This will mark the first time that Fisker luxury plug-in hybrid vehicles become officially available in this region.