Aston Martin has nothing to worry about.
Reports surfaced earlier this week that Aston lawyers sent celebrity designer Henrik Fisker a letter warning him not to unveil his VLF Automotive Force 1 supercar in Detroit today. They claimed that the car looked too similar to the Aston Martin DB10 and that Fisker should change the design in order to avoid conflict with Aston Martin's copyrights.
But after the debut today, it’s easy to see that nobody would confuse this with anything so beautiful.
Yes, the rear end has some elements that from some angles could resemble that DB10, but the rest of it aggressively differentiates itself. The massive long hood has air vents like a rib cage and the arrogance of the Corvette; the carbon fiber wing sits so far up on the top of the carbon fiber roof that it looks like it has been misplaced altogether. (One man I know compared it to a bad lower back tribal tattoo. No comment.) The sides are cut out and low like a radiator scooping the ground.
The best feature of the car is the tiny curved side windows, which follow the line pulling from the front nose through the side and end in elegant wisps that point down toward the rear. Fisker says they’re a totally new element that is in keeping with the main idea of the car—which is to show off.
“This is an American supercar, and American cars are always about ‘show what you got—be up front,’” Fisker said. “European cars are more about what’s underneath. But this is all about showing the power.”
The long hood, too, is there for a reason. It comprises more than half the car in order to house a 8.4 liter V10, 745- horsepower engine. Force 1 will go 218mph and will hit 60mph in 3 seconds. It all makes sense, again, because Fisker says the car is an exercise in ostentation.
“We will have electric cars in the future, but just like we don’t want to eat salad every day, we want a steak very once in a while, or maybe a dessert, this is steak and dessert,” he said.
Fisker isn’t allowing test drives yet of this beast, but with a chassis supplied from Karma Automotive, a bunch of torque in the lower gears, and that V10 engine, suffice it to say it will be extremely unique. (He told me proudly that it’ll be something you can “have a lot of fun in without breaking the speed limit.”)The Mission
One thing Force 1 really isn’t about is making money. Fisker said the reason he made this car is so that wealthy men will have an American option for spending $268,000 on a car. (It will be sold globally, but I expect most buyers will be American.) He said he expects that these men will already own several other luxury cars—Land Rovers, maybe a McLaren—and will relish the opportunity to buy something born in the U.S.A. And, better yet, he doesn’t really need to make that many of them—his new venture with GM icon Bob Lutz, VLF Automotive, is using pre- existing design facilities in California and manufacturing facilities in Michigan to make the new model, not to mention chassis supplied by Fisker Automotive. That means their costs, even when they use elements like that pure carbon fiber rooftop, are pretty low.
Fisker has a lot on his plate as it is. He’s unveiling a Benetti yacht in February at the Miami Boat Show, hosting a TV show with Esquire that will be a competition between car designers, and developing an as-yet unnamed company that will deal with electric cars. (He sold the rights to make the Fisker Karma but still retains rights to the name.) So the Force 1, more than anything, is an exercise for a prolific designer who still genuinely just loves cars.
“When I design a car, I want people to look at it and go, ‘Wow that’s kind of interesting,’ and do a second take,” Fisker said. “When you are pulling into a restaurant for dinner, you will be the only one to have this car. We want to be a little niche player with this company, to offer that to people.”
He’ll make only 100 or so this year. Production starts in April.
