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My motivation for starting Fisker was simple: I thought there must be a market for beautiful, exciting, fast, environmentally friendly cars. The car is probably the only product you can still fall in love with and have a relationship with.
The biggest challenge is to build the team and start the company, while hiring people, raising money, building a brand which has no history, all at the same time. You're doing a lot of things that in an established company are already done.
We designed a car that is for daily commutes and that you charge every day. The less you use the gasoline engine, the better mpg. Essentially, the Karma can achieve dramatic savings and low CO2 output when used as intended, as a daily commuter.
Tesla has defied everyone's predictions again and again. It has such a unique position in the market, and so far, whatever people think about Tesla and its business model, there is one fact that nobody can dispute: It pretty much has the market to itself.
As a car lover, I ask myself, 'What am I going to be buying in the future? Will it be a boring, underpowered, dorky car because the government tells me I shouldn't pollute? Or do I come up with a cool-looking, sexy dream car that is also part of the future?'
I would like to design a really cool watch. I've done a little bit of watches in the past, but I didn't have a lot of freedom because it was already sort of set in stone, everything around the watch. So I think a watch in the future would definitely be in the cards.
If you think about jeans or phones or television, we are used to new brands popping up right and left. But in the car industry, we grew up with Mercedes, BMW, General Motors, and Ford, and nobody can remember during his or her upbringing a new car brand coming to life.
At the end of the day, most people really only want a minivan for a certain part of their lives, when they're forced to have it because they have a lot of kids they've got to carry around or whatever, so I still think that the emotional connection with the car is very important.
I don't take on projects that are a hassle or when someone comes in and says, 'We really need this design,' and I'm like, 'OK, fine, I'll do it.' It really has to be something that I personally feel intrigued and excited about - any product, as long as I'm excited by it. It doesn't have to be a car.
In a startup car company, everything you do has to be done in a different way than a traditional car company. And the main reason is that all of these big car companies are operating like giant well-oiled machines - you could put a very seasoned executive in, and all he has to do is make sure the machine keeps running.
I think we still have a love for cars, and whether you're going to be driven in a car or whether you drive the car yourself, I think most people still want a good-looking car. That's the reason why, when you order a cab, you prefer a sedan over a minivan to pick you up because it just isn't as cool to be driven somewhere in a minivan.
I think with more electric vehicles on the road, hopefully we'll still be able to drive some fantastic sports cars with big V8s, or V10s, or even V12s. Why not? If we can find a way to balance the automotive world, where ultimately, when we have most of the commuters drive electric cars, then we won't really have any issue with some sports cars driving around.
I do think, in the future, headlamps are probably going to be smaller, slimmer. I also think that a lot of designers will start playing around with the daylight running lights. That gives a lot of character to the vehicles in different ways, so I think designers are going to play around with that to try and give each brand a certain DNA so you can almost recognize what car it is when you look at the headlamps.