Fisker Forming Electric Vehicle Partnership With Foxconn

Fisker Inc., the Los Angeles-based electric vehicle startup led by auto designer Henrik Fisker, is forming a partnership with mass-production giant Foxconn to build a new electric vehicle the companies are developing together. 

The model, dubbed Project PEAR (for Personal Electric Automotive Revolution), is some type of crossover, based on an early design Fisker shared on Tuesday and could go into production as early as the fourth quarter of 2023. Foxconn will build up to 250,000 units of the vehicle that will be sold in North America, Europe and China, Fisker said in a statement. 

Financial details of the project and an estimated price for the future vehicle weren’t initially available. 

“The creation of Project PEAR with Foxconn brings together two like-minded and complementary companies, each focused on creating new value in a traditional industry,” Fisker Chairman and CEO Henrik Fisker said. “We will create a vehicle that crosses social borders, while offering a combination of advanced technology, desirable design, innovation and value for money, whilst delivering on our commitment to create the world’s most sustainable vehicles.” 

Fisker is pursuing what it calls an “asset-light” approach to the EV market, relying on contract production of vehicles it designs rather than spending billions of dollars setting up its own factories as Tesla

TSLA
and newcomers such as Lucid Motors and Rivan have. Taiwan-based Foxconn is also eager to move beyond production of smartphones and computer game consoles into the fast-developing market for battery-powered autos. It has developed a platform for future EVs and has previously formed a joint venture with Chinese automaker Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co. and may produce EVs for startups Byton and Faraday Future.

“The key success elements of electric vehicle development include the electric motor, electric control module and battery. We have two major advantages in this regard, with an exceptional vertically integrated global supply chain and the best supply chain management team in our industry,” Foxconn Technology Group Chairman Young-way Liu said in a statement. “Coupled with our accumulated engineering capabilities, Foxconn has been critical to the success of many ICT companies over the past 40 years and we look forward to extending this success with Fisker.”

(For more, see Meet The Fiskers, The Billionaire Power Couple Taking On Tesla)

The new vehicle is on an accelerated development path and formal partnership terms are to be worked out by the end of the second quarter of 2021. “The collaboration between our firms means that it will only take 24 months to produce the next Fisker vehicle – from research and development to production, reducing half of the traditional time required to bring a new vehicle to market,” Young-way Liu said.

Fisker’s first model, the electric Ocean crossover, goes into production in late 2022 and will be built by automotive supplier Magna, which is also an investor in Fisker Inc. Fisker said it has 12,000 initial orders for the vehicle, which has a base price of about $38,000.

Shares of Fisker, which recently went public in a SPAC merger, jumped 15% at the start of trading in New York on Tuesday to $18.76.