FISKER ARMA CHAMELEON
Has there ever been a car exec with a thicker skin and more bounce backs than Henrik Fisker? Once a high-flying young designer at BMW in the Nineties, he pinned the Z8 to his CV early, but quickly graduated to board member and design chief at Aston Martin, claiming the 2005 V8 Vantage as his finest hour. Later, as boss of his own eponymous company, he trailblazed plug-in hybrid tech with the Karma, before a battery supplier upset the apple cart. In the cracks between, he found time to pen the Artega GT (remember that?), have a hand in the Model S design, be sued (unsuccessfully) by Elon Musk and go into business with Bob ‘Maximum’ Lutz flogging coachbuilt Vipers. And now he’s back, taking the resurrected Fisker brand in a new direction with an all-electric, premium-but-affordable SUV that has Tesla looking in its rear-view mirror. We caught up with one of the car industry’s great enigmas and asked him to take us back to where it all began.
TOP GEAR: WHAT WERE YOU LIKE AS A KID?
Henrik Fisker: I was a troublemaker, I can tell you that. I was born in Denmark, where there’s no car industry. My father was an electric engineer, my mother worked in the tax department – normal, middle class upbringing, but my father loved cars. I remember being in the back seat of his Saab 95, and then later a Saab 96, and
