The Fisker Karma extended range electric vehicle (EERV) will be produced in Finland by Valmet Automotive, the California luxury outfit announced recently.
The company recently purchased a former GM plant in Wilmington, Delaware, where production is scheduled to start on Fisker's next line of lower-priced family-oriented vehicles in early 2013.
Fisker announced this week that it agreed to buy the plant from the “old GM” shell company, Motors Liquidation Company, for $20-million (U.S). The sale was helped along by a $528.7-million loan to Fisker from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop its two lines of plug-in luxury hybrids. Like the Chevrolet Volt, these would run on plug-in battery power for the first 50 miles or so, then recharged the batteries through an on-board internal combustion engine. The first will be the delayed Karma sedan.
Led by design guru and former Aston Martin lead pen Henrik Fisker, the Karma sedan has already given rise to sportier two-door versions called the Sunset, in both coupe and convertible prototypes. All these Karma-based cars are expected to cost more than $90,000, while the more affordable plug-in hybrid vehicles, codenamed NINA, are planned to come in at about half that, if any of them arrive in Canada at all, which still hasn't been confirmed.
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Correction: The Fisker Karma extended range electric vehicle will be produced in Finland by Valmet Automotive, not at its newly purchased Wilmington, Delaware plant, with customer deliveries to start in early 2011. That Delaware plant is scheduled to start full production of Fisker's next line of lower-priced family-oriented vehicles in early 2013.
The story above contained factual errors which have now been corrected.
TOYOTA,TESLA CONFIRM PLANS
Boutique electric car maker Tesla and new partner Toyota will pair up to bring an all-electric Toyota RAV4 to market by 2012, the companies confirmed recently, while a second plug-in EV prototype coming from the duo will reportedly be of a Lexus RX electric vehicle.
The two companies confirmed that they plan to bring Toyota's new-generation RAV4 EV to the U.S. by using Tesla's unique arrangement of thousands of laptop lithium-ion batteries in the not-so-compact SUV's body. The first prototype has already been built, with a fleet of them expected to be ready for testing by the end of the year.
Toyota and Tesla also confirmed that they are collaborating on another production electric vehicle, with a prototype to be delivered to Toyota by the end of July, but they haven't confirmed publicly which one. Before confirmation of the RAV4 came late last week, Bloomberg BusinessWeek magazine reported that the two prototype EVs would be all- electric versions of the RAV4 and Lexus RX sport-utility, citing an unnamed person familiar with the two firms' plans.
Intriguingly, the gasoline-only versions of the RAV4 and RX 350 are both currently built at Toyota Canada's plant in Cambridge, Ont., raising the possibility that Toyota's new generation of EVs could potentially start life in Canada, in co-operation with Tesla. The plants were the first outside Japan to build both vehicles, an especially significant coup for the RX, as it was also the first Lexus to be built outside its home country.
But Tesla and Toyota also announced in May that they would use the former NUMMI plant in Fremont, Calif., to jointly produce electric vehicles there. So if there's any Canadian connection to these new EVs at all, and that's a big if, it may be in the form of providing rolling chassis to this downsized plant for the final installation of Tesla's EV components, similar to how Lotus currently provides Lotus Europa bodies for what then become Tesla Roadsters.
The current gas-electric RX 450h hybrid is still built exclusively in Japan; Toyota execs said at the hybrid's launch last year that the supplier infrastructure for the batteries and other hybrid-only components had not yet arrived in Canada.
