Fisker Stars in Rebirth of Shuttered Delaware GM Plant
At 10 a.m. tomorrow, Vice President Joe Biden will stand with Delaware Governor Jack Markell inside General Motors’ shuttered Boxwood plant in Wilmington and make an announcement that will surprise absolutely no one: Fisker Automotive, the former Delaware senator will say, is buying the plant to make its $46,000 Project Nina cars (beginning in 2012).
Fisker declined to comment. “Come to the event,” said spokesman Russell Datz.
The move is likely to quiet the uproar raised by this “foreign” company (actually based in Irvine, California) getting a $528 million Department of Energy loan. The din was made louder because Fisker is to build its luxury plug-in hybrid Karma in far-away Finland. “This was a loan, and it has to be paid back with interest,” Henrik Fisker told me at the time. “There seems to be some confusion between grants and loans. And all the money has to be spent in the U.S.—it’s a condition of the loan.”
The Karma is relatively low-volume at just 15,000 a year, and Fisker claims he tried and failed to find an American manufacturer that wanted to build it—so the deal with Valmet Automotive, announced last summer, was his second choice.
“Valmet offers us the quality and speed necessary to meet our production goals, and given that more than half of Fisker Automotive’s sales are expected to be outside North America, Valmet represents an ideal international foothold,” Henrik Fisker said.
The half-priced Nina car projects volumes of 75,000 to 100,000 annually, so building it in the U.S. is apparently not an issue. Fisker has said it will use $360 million of its loan to develop the Nina, with the rest to be spent on final engineering for the Karma. Again, Fisker says the money will stay in the U.S., at its Pontiac, Michigan facility. When it announced the federal loan, Fisker said the car was to be built at “a retooled U.S. assembly plant.”
The Delaware plant, built in 1947, was most recently used to produce GM’s sports car twins, the Pontiac Solstice and Saturn Sky (ironically, styled by Franz von Holzhausen, the same guy who did the Tesla Model S battery car). But now Pontiac is in the history books, and with Roger Penske bowing out of Saturn, that marque will disappear, too. GM is still looking for a marque to take on its plug-in hybrid.
Jim Motavalli is the author of Forward Drive: The Race to Build Clean Cars for the Future, among other books. He has been covering the environmental side of the auto industry for more than a decade, and writes regularly on those topics for the New York Times.
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