Fisker Automotive Inc. considered locating its assembly plant in General Motors’ now-shuttered Pontiac East Assembly plant before settling on Wilmington, Del., newly released records show.
More than 100 pages of documents released by the U.S. Treasury Department showed Fisker co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Barney Koehler also considered a former GM plant in Moraine, Ohio, and the New United Motor Manufacturing facility operated jointly by GM and Toyota Motor Corp. in California.
Tesla Motors announced last month that it is teaming up with Toyota to build an electric sedan at the recently shuttered NUMMI plant in Fremont.
In August, the old General Motors Corp., renamed Motors Liquidation Co. during GM’s bankruptcy, offered Fisker three sites: a 3.2-million-square-foot facility in Delaware; the 4.5-million-square-foot assembly plant in Ohio; and the 3.5-million-square-foot Pontiac Assembly center, which was closed the following month.
The Pontiac factory produced the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickup trucks and employed about 1,500 workers.
By early September, Fisker had visited the sites in Pontiac and Delaware, and “the Delaware plant appears to be favored,” Al Koch, the CEO of Motors Liquidation, told White House auto czar Ron Bloom in a Sept. 9 e-mail.
At the time, Fisker had an engineering center in Pontiac. In January, Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Lansing, had written to Energy Secretary Steven Chu on Fisker’s behalf, urging him to give “strong consideration” to the factory, noting it was a “green American premium sports car company.”
In February, however, Fisker closed its Pontiac center and shifted the work to California.
Koch, quoting Koehler, said Fisker was planning to produce 100,000 vehicles a year.
“I will say that Barney rattled through the various brands that he is building or planning (and) I got a little lost. Hopefully, the need for an assembly plant is real and not speculative,” Koch wrote.
Russell Datz, a spokesman for Fisker, said this week that the Irvine, Calif.-based automaker decided on the Delaware plant because it best fit the company’s needs.
He noted that Fisker plans to export more than half of its electric vehicles, and the Delaware plant is close to a deepwater port. The area had a good work force, Datz added, as well as a relatively new paint shop. And it had only recently been closed.
Speedy approval requested
The records also show that Fisker told federal officials it needed speedy approval of an Energy Department loan to put its plans into action.
“The company says it needs approval as part of the next round of loans on Sept. 14 or they may not be able to manufacture their next car, the Fisker KX, in the U.S.,” Larry Windley, an aide to Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., wrote in an e-mail to Bloom.
On Sept. 22, the Energy Department announced it had awarded Fisker a $529 million loan.
The following month, Fisker said it would acquire the GM Boxwood plant in Delaware for $18 million. But the sale hasn’t been completed yet.
