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"April 5, 2013 was the kind of milestone day in the history of Fisker Automotive that every company hopes it can avoid. Unfortunately for the company, named for since-departed founder Henrik Fisker, it was a milestone that befalls most startup companies in their final days. Fisker&amp;#039;s 200+ staff members assembled for an all-hands meeting at 8:30 AM. Minutes later, three quarters of the people in the room were unemployed. Over the next couple of hours, 160 people gathered their belongings and left Fisker&amp;#039;s Anaheim offices for the last time. One of those now-unemployed staffers agreed to speak to Road &amp;amp;amp; Track about the experience with the company. Because a number of aspects of the Fisker Automotive situation remain unsettled at this time, including a pending class-action lawsuit against the company over the lack of warning about the mass layoffs, our contact asked to remain anonymous. We&amp;#039;ll just call him Joe. When asked about whether he was a party to the litigation, Joe declined to comment for this story. Joe joined Fisker soon after its founding and was there for most of the tumultuous ride over the past four years. The layoffs last week were not the first big surprise of late. Henrik Fisker&amp;#039;s resignation last month also caught almost everyone in the company by surprise. &amp;quot;Henrik&amp;#039;s departure didn&amp;#039;t have a material effect on operations,&amp;quot; said Joe, since Fisker had already stepped away from day-to-day management when he handed over the reins a year ago, first to Tom LaSorda and then to Tony Posawatz. Fisker&amp;#039;s departure mostly left people wondering, &amp;quot;what&amp;#039;s next?&amp;quot; Apparently, the disagreement between the founder and CEO Posawatz was related to the Department of Energy loans. Fisker felt that it was no longer worth trying to find a way to tap the remaining $300 million in low-interest loans that had originally been approved by the DoE. Prior to mid-2012, Fisker had drawn $192 million of that money before the DoE closed the tap. Posawatz reportedly wanted to find a way to get the remaining funds released. To Joe&amp;#039;s knowledge, product strategy was not part of Fisker&amp;#039;s decision to leave. &amp;quot;Fisker never had a desire to get the maximum amount of efficiency out of the car,&amp;quot; said Joe. &amp;quot;Design was always the priority, and the philosophy was sacrifice some efficiency of what the maximum could be in the name of design.&amp;quot; The focus on form over function was clear from the very beginning and reinforced by the production Karma&amp;#039;s EPA mileage ratings. For example, the enormous 22-inch wheel-and-tire package did nothing to abate the Karma&amp;#039;s 5,300-pound curb weight. Despite that, Joe reminded R&amp;amp;amp;T that the Karma meets the 2025 corporate average fuel economy standards today. Despite the somewhat disappointing results for those who remember the early claims of 100 mpg, the Karma is far more efficient than obvious competitors like the Aston Martin Rapide. Nonetheless, various issues ranging from efficiency to the infotainment system led many to believe that the Karma was under-engineered. It certainly would have been if Fisker managed to meet the original schedule of getting the Karma into production by the end of 2009, barely two years after launching the project. As it was, the car was more than two years late, but as Joe reminds R&amp;amp;amp;T, they still managed to get the Karma from concept to production in just 47 months. That&amp;#039;s an impressive achievement for an established automaker, and even more remarkable for a startup. In comparison, it took Tesla more than five years to deliver the first &amp;quot;production&amp;quot; Roadster to Elon Musk, and that was a vastly simpler car based on an evolution of an existing platform. Fisker built a platform from the ground up; the General Motors-supplied 2.0-liter range extender was one of few off-the-shelf components.  Joe insists that the company achieved its goals and had the engineering know-how to truly succeed. &amp;quot;The goal was to bring to market a unique car with exceptional styling with the most efficiency that it could provide within the limitations of the design. And design was always the priority.&amp;quot; One of the major factors that brought Fisker Automotive to its current precarious state was the collapse of battery supplier A123 Systems. Joe emphasizes that the none of the Karmas produced suffered a powertrain or battery failure that was the result of a design or chemistry problem. The battery failures that did occur were a direct result of a manufacturing problem at A123&amp;#039;s Livonia, MI factory. Fisker had to stop producing cars last summer while A123 scrambled to produce replacement batteries for those early cars. It was then that A123 simply ran out of financial runway and had to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Among other things, that led to more than 300 Karmas sitting at a port in New Jersey last fall waiting for replacement batteries right when hurricane Sandy blasted through. Joe says that despite the problems with A123, Fisker didn&amp;#039;t seriously consider switching to a different battery supplier. Going with new cells and packs from a different supplier would have taken two years or more and cost millions of dollars to design and validate; time and money that Fisker didn&amp;#039;t have at its disposal. The automaker has done what it could to help push forward a resolution of the A123 bankruptcy case, including settling its claims last week for $15 million. Despite all of Fisker&amp;#039;s problems the past two years, Joe reminds us that the startup delivered more than 2,000 Karmas to customers in less than one year, generating more than $200 million in revenues. It&amp;#039;s not clear how much it cost to actually cost to build those cars, not including the sunk development costs, but given that the DoE cut off loan access before production was halted, the ink is almost certainly very red. Even as funds dried up, Joe tells R&amp;amp;amp;T that Fisker pushed ahead with engineering work on what was to be its second product, the smaller, more affordable Atlantic. Joe couldn&amp;#039;t tell R&amp;amp;amp;T exactly where the development was, but the company had evidently done as much as possible within the constraints of its financial situation. Joe believes that Fisker made the right decision to pursue the plug-in hybrid approach rather than a pure battery electric vehicle like the Tesla Model S. Tesla&amp;#039;s success notwithstanding, almost every major automaker is pursuing plug-in hybrids and extended range EVs as a more suitable solution for the near to mid term. Joe bears no ill will toward Fisker Automotive and hopes the management team can find a way to keep the company operating as a going concern. He doesn&amp;#039;t know for sure whether Fisker will file for bankruptcy as has been rumored. Even if Fisker does have resort to Chapter 11, Joe hopes that someone will step up and buy the company as a whole instead of breaking it up and selling off the parts. Paraphrasing the old Peace Corps tagline; Joe says, &amp;quot;This was the toughest job I ever loved. I experienced more in four years than I would in a lifetime with any other car company.&amp;quot; Given the opportunity, he would do it again, and whatever happens going forward, Joe will look back on his time with Fisker with pride at what was accomplished. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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