$529M DOE Loan Spawns $97K Made-in-Finland Cars

theodp writes "With PR successes like the Fisker Karma, does the Department of Energy need to worry about PR failures like Solyndra? ABC News and others are reporting that electric car company Fisker, which received a $529M federal loan guarantee with the approval of the Obama administration, is assembling its first line of $96,985 base-priced hybrid cars in Finland, saying it could not find a facility in the United States capable of doing the work. According to Green Car Reports, Fisker said the EPA had rated the Karma at 54 MPGe (MPG-equivalent) when running on electricity from its battery pack, and that the EPA-rated electric range would be 32 miles. Omitted from the press release was the 20-mpg rating for a Karma running on power from its range-extending gasoline engine."

Comments

Re:Sincerity?

[AliasMarlowe]

Actually, the availability of certain manufacturing processes and related skills is often localized. There are several kinds of modern manufacturing process which appear to be unavailable or uncommon in the US.

One of the products I designed has certain parts (passive, but necessarily complex in shape) which are made in Finland, simply because no US or Canadian supplier could be found who could make them in moderate quantities. The only US bids received stated that they assumed we had made an error in the RFQ, and actually required quantities in the tens of thousands. These suppliers relied on a manufacturing process which required that scale and would result in prohibitively expensive unit costs for a production run of mere hundreds. The supplier in Finland uses an entirely different industrial process, and can produce single digit quantities if necessary, at quite acceptable unit prices.