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As the auto industry emerges from crisis , new hope is given to a General Motors factory town with today’s announcement that Fisker Automotive will purchase the Wilmington Assembly plant in Delaware. Vice President Joe Biden and Delaware Governor Jack Markell were on hand for the news that Fisker signed a letter of purchase intent for $18 million. An additional $175 million will be spent to refurbish and retool the factory over the next three years. The funds come from a conditional loan of $528.7 million the Department of Energy awarded the company in September. The facility that previously built the Pontiac Solstice and Saturn Sky will be overhauled to assemble an “affordable” plug-in hybrid sedan dubbed Project NINA. Production is expected to begin in late 2012, and Project NINA is optimistically forecast to support 2,000 factory jobs and more than 3,000 vendor and supplier jobs by 2014, as production ramps up to full capacity of 75,000-100,000 vehicles per year. More than half of the sedans are expected to be exported. The car itself is estimated to cost about $39,900 after federal tax credits. Learn about the Fisker Karma , a luxurious plug-in hybrid that delivers an estimated...
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Safety experts have become so concerned that today's whisper-quiet hybrid and electric cars may pose a danger to visually-impaired pedestrians that they've introduced a study to investigate whether such vehicles should have artificial soundtracks to help people nearby hear them....
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Fisker has released a bevy of numbers ahead of the Frankfurt Motor Show, where the boutique automaker will make a splash with its four-door Karma next week. (We last saw the Karma at the New York auto show .) The curvaceous plug-in hybrid electric will be touting its fuel economy figures of 3.5L/100km, based on Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) methodology. That translates to about 67 mpg. Calculations developed by SAE estimate carbon dioxide output will be less than that of today's cleanest production cars and 75 percent less than that of competing vehicles, on average, according to Fisker. Fuel economy is the bragging rights future cars will hang their reputation on. Take the Chevrolet Volt , for example. General Motors created big buzz with a marketing campaign centered around a claimed 230 mpg city rating, 100 mpg overall, based on development testing using a draft EPA federal fuel economy methodology for labeling plug-in electric vehicles. This high claim may come back to bite GM, as it is only theoretically achievable. On the other hand, this figure from Fisker appears quite fair on the surface. Only real-world testing will show how practical the rating is. However, there...
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