Fisker harvests deposits for unseen Pear

Fisker Inc. racked up roughly 1,500 reservations within days for its second electric vehicle, which hasn't been shown and won't be delivered until 2024, CEO Henrik Fisker said.

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 to demonstrate demand to battery suppliers.

"Normally, a car company does due diligence of a supplier," Fisker told Bloomberg News last week 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, at a time when Tesla Inc.'s only model on the market was the Roadster.

Fisker Automotive went bankrupt in 2013 after its sole battery supplier went bust.

The designer of BMW and Aston Martin luxury cars bounced back to form Fisker Inc. in 2016 and took it public in 2020 via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company. The new firm has taken more than 32,000 reservations for its first EV, the Ocean SUV, which is scheduled to go into production in November in Graz, Austria. Manufacturing partner Magna Steyr has 47 Ocean prototypes in various stages of pre-production there, he said.

The Pear will be made — grown? — at the onetime Chevy plant in Lordstown, Ohio. After GM stopped Cruze production there, startup Lordstown Motors wanted to use it to make trucks. In a cash crunch, Lordstown sold the site to iPhone assembler Foxconn, which says it plans to use the plant to make Lordstown's pickup and Fisker's Pear.