Fisker Update

Mr. Fisker starting a new car company - especially one he is going to name "Fisker" - is a pretty bold move. One would have thought he could stay in the car business but have a different front man and company name. But he's decided to head the company and named it the same as the failed company that never paid back the taxpayers the paltry sum of $139 million dollars.

Yeah, we in the US gave Mr. Fisker 139 MILLION DOLLARS and he just took it. I'll bet he keeps all his profit from his new company... if it doesn't go bust.

Best not dwell on such minutiae.

He's got a great new idea. He has the design for a beautiful new all electric car which he says will compete with Tesla. Isn't that special?

How can he compete with Tesla? Easy. With whiz-bang new battery technology that will give this fancy new car over 400 miles of range on a full charge. Fisker says they have a way to make a super capacitor, perhaps something close to the holy grail of battery technology. The secret they say is a machine that can make graphene at $.10 a kilogram.

They say with inexpensive graphene that a supercapacitor will be easily made. And that super capacitor, which they are saying has more battery properties than capacitor properties, has a greater energy density than the current best Li-Ion technology out there. And it can handle more charging current and discharge very rapidly - like a capacitor. All this with the ability to cycle a great deal more than Li-Ion, which is again, similar to a capacitor. So they brand it a "super battery" instead of a "super capacitor." If it works as advertised they can call it "late for dinner."

But with Fisker's track record, I'm not so keen. I don't think the battery will work as well as they plan. And I don't think it will be nearly as inexpensive as they plan.

Perhaps I seem cynical. Perhaps Fisker isn't even planning to get public money this time around (Hopefully it isn't offered... to anyone). Perhaps Mr. Fisker really is planning to make billions and pay back the 139 MILLION DOLLARS he got from the US taxpayer. Not because he has to, but just because he really is a good man.

Perhaps.