Fisker Inc. (NYSE:FSR) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Henrik Fisker: And Dan, maybe just to add to that, you mentioned Alaska. That will be very broadly based on the Ocean. We’re going to call it the FT 32 platform, but it’s really a derivative of the Ocean. So again, you’re not now engineering a car from ground up. And that’s also why we can have — we can create a driver of prototype really quickly because when we created the first driver prototype of the Ocean, there was nothing there. Everything had to be new. That’s not the case with future vehicles.

Dr. Geeta Gupta-Fisker: Dan, I hate to say the final comment, but frankly, there is a price point per new startup. There’s a price of entry and suppliers generally charge you a higher ED&D. Once you get past that phase, you are welcomed into the club and you get treated like a real OEM.

Dan Levy: Great. Thanks. And then, just a follow-up. Maybe you can talk a bit more about the time line of PEAR. You mentioned you have a prototype, but how many incremental prototype stages are there? At what point do you start to do the supplier sourcing, when does the BOM get locked in? And I think you had mentioned at one point that there was a high amount of carryover content from Ocean to PEAR. Maybe you can reiterate if that’s still the case or any incremental color on that front, please? Thank you.

Henrik Fisker: Yes. So first, what I mentioned was a new way to specify a vehicle. And what I mean by that is that when anyone, anywhere in the world creates a car, it is a set of spec books, and spec books means that every part could be the mirror. For example, there’s a spec book on the mirror and that spec book, for example, on the mirror might contain 20 different things from the light has to be — to glass, the cap on the mirror, everything that’s in that mirror, a little electric motor whatever. And what normally happens is you create that spec book, specifically as a start-up together with suppliers, sometimes. What happens with normal OEMs or traditional OEMs that’s been added for a while, they take the spec book from their previous car and they apply it to the next car, which essentially — I mean, it’s just like a recipe in a bakery when the son or daughter takes over, they will use the same recipe as the mother and father did and nothing really changes.

In our case, we decided with a PEAR to actually completely redo these spec books. We obviously had all the experience with the Ocean, and we fine combed through it. And certain elements that are great at the Ocean that we can use real use, but other things may be too premium because at the end of the day, the Fisker Ocean is a premium vehicle that goes all the way up to $70,000. So, of course, it has certain engineering solutions that fit that premium segment. But when we looked at the PEAR, we wanted to come up with some ideas that has never been done before to achieve our goal of being able to sell this vehicle for $29,900 as the base price and make money on it. And we went through all that and have already gone through all that. We have also gone through how can we lower the cost of the total development?

Maybe we do less prototypes, maybe do prototypes at different stage. There’s a whole bunch of things we’re going through. Now, I’m not about to show our menu, just like Coca-Cola doesn’t show their ingredients, there’s laying in some safe somewhere and so it does here at Fisker. So I’m not going to elaborate more on that. But believe me, it’s a pretty exciting program, and it will come out at $29,900.