With the demise of Solyndra, a solar company that also won a half-billion-dollar loan from a program to spur clean-energy technologies, the Energy Department’s loan guarantees have come under intense scrutiny, and the Obama administration has been under fire for making risky loans to unproven ventures. The administration has stood behind the lending, some of it funded by stimulus, saying that risk is inherent in backing emerging technologies.
Fisker was among the big winners in the administration’s effort for broader development of electric vehicles, and company officials said their problems bear no resemblance to those of Solyndra, which filed for bankruptcy protection in September.
“Without any excuses, yes, we did have some delays,” company co-founder Henrik Fisker said during a stop in the District this week to show off his company’s sleek new Karma. “But this is completely different. You can’t compare at all.”
The Energy Department confirmed this week that it has eased expectations after conditionally approving the loan to Fisker and has made allowances for scaling back projections in the final loan agreement. But the agency declined to make public those adjusted terms, including projected car sales volume or milestones the company must meet in connection with its $529 million loan. Agency officials attributed Fisker’s delays to regulatory hurdles and issues beyond the company’s control.
Henrik Fisker said in an interview Wednesday that, as of this week, the Karma had been cleared for sale in the United States. Forty have arrived from Finland to be delivered to dealers, and four identical silver versions of the low-slung sedan were parked outside the District’s Mandarin Oriental hotel.
“Next year we will reach the 12,000 or 15,000 vehicles we predicted,” Fisker said. “We are really past the start-up risks. That means the skeptics who said we would never produce a car were wrong.”
Energy Secretary Steven Chu was ebullient in September 2009 when he announced the Obama administration’s conditional backing for the California-based start-up.
“This investment will create thousands of new American jobs and is another critical step in making sure we are positioned to compete for the clean-energy jobs of the future,” Chu said in a statement at the time. He and President Obama had used similar language when heralding the future of Solyndra.
The Fisker commitment was questioned by some from the start, partly because of the company’s political connections. A key investor is a venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, whose partners include former Democratic vice president Al Gore. The investment house raised $2 million for Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.
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