Ford hired Fisker away to London to become design chief and a board member of its Aston Martin brand. There, he drew the Aston Martin DB9 and V8 Vantage, then ran Ford's Ingeni "creativity center." In 2003 Fisker found himself back in California as director of Ford's Global Advanced Design Studio in Irvine.
Fisker and his longtime friend and engineering colleague, Bernhard Koehler, founded a luxury coachbuilder in 2005 that morphed into Fisker Automotive.
Although the Karma design won praise, in a January 2012 interview, Henrik Fisker admitted that the company needed a higher-volume model: "You are not a car company until you are making revenue-generating cars, and you are making $2 million a day."