Remember the Fisker car company? Talented designer selling sleek electric cars for $100,000 each until a battery recall – among other things – bankrupted the outfit? Well the Chinese auto parts empire Wanxiang bought them last year, and reportedly just bought 555,670 square feet of California to resume production.
The LA Times says; “The company has agreed to rent a new 556,000-square-foot industrial building at 17100 Perris Blvd., according to real estate broker Ian DeVries of Colliers International, who represented landlord First Industrial Realty Trust in the deal.”
Apparently the building’s “slim” design makes it good for an assembly line. And I guess that building must be pretty new, because here’s what Google Street View says that address looks like:
Or maybe they’re off by a few numbers. Moreno Valley has plenty of large, nondescript commercial structures in it.
A few weeks ago the city of Moreno Valley put out a press release alerting citizens that Fisker was hiring “approximately 37 qualified individuals” to do assembly, body, electrical, and quality assurance-related jobs at this facility.
Fisker told The Press Enterprise that they were looking to hire about 150 full-time people in total to run the place and rumor has it the company is gearing up to be building cars by the end of this year.
Regarding the development, Fisker’s Chief Marketing Officer Jim Taylor says; “Fisker believes in the quality, work ethic and competitiveness of manufacturing in the USA... California’s natural beauty, trend setting, technology, and environmental focus are perfectly aligned with our Karma re-launch.”
We haven’t heard back from Fisker ourselves, but we’ll let you know if we hear any more specifics on their progress.
Interestingly, Fisker, or Wanxiang, won’t be the only Chinese car company building vehicles in California. The LA Times points out that BYD has 160 workers running a plant in Lancaster, CA making electric buses for the LA County Metro Transportation Authority.
After all the money that’s dumped into Fisker since it was founded in 2007, some reports put the total at almost $1.5 billion, what’s another 30 million bucks?
Good luck, Fisker. Everybody loves an underdog story.
Contact the author at andrew@jalopnik.com.