News of Fisker buying GM's shuttered Wilmington Assembly plant is good news for Fisker, but bad news for the DeLorean Solstice, which the new DeLorean Motor Company hoped to build at the plant.
DMC and an undisclosed partner had hoped to restart the 3.2 million sqaure-foot Wilmington, Delaware plant with renewed production of the Kappa-based coupes, which were the last vehicles built at the plant.
This turn of events put those plans in question.
"I'm glad to see some progress with Fisker's project and glad to see some of the DOE/ATVM money used to support green cars and green manufacturer," said James Espy, Vice President of the DeLorean Motor Company in a quick chat with us today. "I still hope there's a future for a Solstice/Sky product to carry on and until we hear otherwise we'll continue our efforts towards that end."
How much hope is there? According to Fisker, production likely won't begin until late 2012, which means the plant will sit, tooled for building Solstices, until renovations and retooling starts.
It's possible Fisker could consent to making money off the plant and putting people back to work immediately by starting limited production on Solstice vehicles before all the tooling is scrapped, but we've yet to hear anything confirming this as a possibility.
In the meantime, Solstice/DeLorean fans will have to wait.