Taxpayer Dollars to Troubled Car Company
Just as it began so shall it end
Early during his first year as vice-president, Joe Biden made a bold claim regarding $529 million in a taxpayer-backed loan to Fisker Automotive. “This is seed money that will return back to the American consumer in billions and billions and billions of dollars in good new jobs,” he announced.
Fisker was a relatively new automobile company promising to build plug-in hybrid electric cars that would be snapped up a green energy-conscious public. The money was to come from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a bill quickly ushered through Congress and signed into law only weeks after Barack Obama became president.
Nicknamed the ‘Recovery Act,’ the $831 billion stimulus package became notorious for billions of dollars wasted on green-energy and so-called shovel-ready investments that never fulfilled their promises.
This half-a-billion dollar loan appeared more promising than similar failed ventures. Three years after Biden’s claim, Fisker Automotive was employing several hundred workers building luxury hybrid electric vehicles … at its plant in Finland. The Finnish plant was making the $100,000 Fisker Karma luxury sports car.
The irony was Biden made his pronouncement at a Delaware that was closed in 2009 as part of the General Motors bankruptcy. Fisker promised to build a more affordable sedan (here and here) at the shuttered GM plant than its $100,000 Finnish luxury car. That is, if a $50,000 price tag for a sedan in 2009 is considered ‘affordable.’
The proceeds from the half-a-billion loan would help Fisker get the former GM assembly plant in full production by the end of 2012. Fisker promised it would be turning out 100,000 cars annually.
When this correspondent made an unannounced visit to the plant in April 2012, we didn’t see a single new car. Nor did we see any cars being assembled. Instead, we found a plant with just four employee cars in the parking lot, and not one of them was a Fisker. Days earlier, about a dozen employees were laid-off from the plant leaving only a handful of workers. A Fisker company representative refused to answer our questions regarding the vacant assembly plant and promises it would be building 8-10,000 cars a month.
Fisker Automotive filed for bankruptcy the following year, 2013. US taxpayers lost $139 million from the 2009 loan. Most of the company was purchased by Chinese automotive parts firm, Wangxiang.
Danish automobile designer Henrik Fisker founded Fisker Automotive. He retained the manufacturer’s name and logo to launch another electric vehicle company, Fisker Inc. The new Fisker car manufacturer filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in July 2024.
This week, Biden announced a $6.6 billion loan to Rivian, another electric vehicle manufacturer. Like Fisker Automotive, Rivian has struggled to reach profitability. It lost $5.4 billion in 2023.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Mark Hyman is a 35-year military veteran and an Emmy award-winning investigative journalist. Follow him on Twitter, Gettr, Parler, and Mastodon.world at @markhyman, and on Truth Social at @markhyman81.
His books Washington Babylon: From George Washington to Donald Trump, Scandals That Rocked the Nation and Pardongate: How Bill and Hillary Clinton and their Brothers Profited from Pardons are on sale now (here and here).