Fisker Karma

Valmet Automotive and Fisker Automotive have signed the cooperation agreement

Valmet Automotive and an American premium car company, Fisker Automotive Inc. have signed the final contract to manufacture Fisker Karma vehicles in Finland. Valmet Automotive will be the engineering and manufacturing supplier for Fisker Automotive.

Fisker Karma is a new four-door plug-in hybrid sports sedan and its production is planned to start in the Q4 of 2009. The first cars will be delivered to North America and the deliveries to Europe are planned to start 2010. The annual production is projected to reach 15,000 cars.

For the production of Fisker Karma, a new body welding line will be built at Valmet Automotive. The painting and assembly process can be easily adapted to the production of electric and hybrid cars.

“The agreement is very significant for us and our employment situation in the years to come”, says Ilpo Korhonen, President of Valmet Automotive. “With the planned full production volume the cooperation with Fisker Automotive will employ some 500 blue collar workers at Valmet Automotive.”

“Fisker Automotive and Valmet Automotive make a great, professional team. The schedule is demanding, but I am confident that with good cooperation the production will start in schedule. A hybrid drive train, battery technology and a new body design with light weight materials is a great challenge to our engineering and production teams. Our supplier quality management team is also involved in the project.”

“We are pleased with the current progress in this working relationship and know that we have the team that will help us meet our production goal”, says Fisker Automotive COO, Bernhard Koehler.

“We are very pleased to have the final contract signed and are looking forward to a long business relationship with Valmet Automotive”, says Fisker Automotive CEO, Henrik Fisker.

Fisker Automotive is a privately owned American car company. The company was founded in 2007 as joint venture of Fisker Coachbuild, LLC and Quantum Fuel Systems Technologies Worldwide Inc., the leading supplier of powertrain engineering for electric vehicles.

Valmet Automotive is a provider of automotive engineering and manufacturing services of premium cars. In nearly 40 years the company has produced over 1,000,000 high-quality vehicles in Finland. The cars have been delivered worldwide. Today Valmet Automotive manufactures Porsche Boxster and Porsche Cayman for Porsche AG. The company is a part of Metso Corporation.