There's an old adage: how do you make a small fortune in motorsports? Start with a big one. The same could be said for the car making business. By various counts, there've been at least 800 automotive wannabes in the U.S. market alone over the last century, and we're down to three -- at least for the moment.
But while two of Detroit's Big Three are teetering on the edge of the abyss, there are all sorts of new players who would like to take the place of struggling General Motors and Chrysler. Like Tesla Motors, the Silicon Valley start-up founded by Internet gazillionaire Elon Musk.
Based in the San Francisco suburbs, Musk's goal is to use a digital-age approach to revolutionize the hidebound auto industry. After a troubled development period, Tesla recently put the first of its Roadsters, a $100,000, two-seat, battery-powered sports car, into production. But the company is already promising to launch a new family sedan, the Model S, at barely half that price.
Tesla is by no means alone. About 400 miles to the south automotive designer Henrik Fisker has set up a company of his own, Fisker Automotive. In a previous life, the Danish entrepreneur served as chief designer for the high-performance sports car manufacturer Aston Martin. Now he's seen the light, and it's a green one. And while Fisker Automotive still hopes to appeal to upscale buyers, it plans to do so with a striking new plug-in hybrid-electric vehicle, or PHEV.
Dubbed Karma, the company claims the production version will be able to travel up to 50 miles purely on the energy stored in its lithium-ion battery pack. Unlike the purely electric Tesla Roadster and the planned Model S sedan, Fisker's Karma will be able to keep going when the batteries run down, automatically switching to its small gasoline engine.
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