My first test drive was at a Fisker popup, and boy did it pop!
By December 2023, Fisker had opened their first Los Angeles pop up showroom, at The Grove. This is a trend amongst new cars that don’t have a traditional dealership network, they would open a storefront in a mall that would at least allow you to get hands on with the car. Tesla did this, Lucid does this, even Polestar with its Volvo connection, has them. I have to say, I don’t really like these pop-ups. The problem is they have one or two cars on the floor, so you didn’t really get a sense of the variety of interior and exterior colors, various wheels and fabric packages.
Fisker at the time had 12 colors to choose from, four of which were blue. There was Mariana blue which was a blue-green glossy finish, there was Blue Planet, an Easter Bunny pastel blue, Silver Lining, which had tinges of blue, and then there was Big Sur Blue, a $4,500 upcharge for the Metallic Matte Blue finish that honestly, needed to be seen on a full car. There were also two Blacks, a White, and a Gray, the classic Los Angeles colors. Or lack thereof. And then 2 different Greens, a Red and a Copper color that was called, Solar Orange. This was the color of the video on the Fisker site, showing the car driving along a sea grass trail. This was the video, all 12 seconds, that I couldn’t stop watching. I wanted that color so bad!
Either way, the popup was there with two cars inside, so we popped by the pop up (haha) and I was excited to see the cars had made it to production. I have to say that upon my initial sitting in the car that I was pleasantly pleased with the spacing of the car. It felt nice and roomy, and yet at the same time, not overwhelmingly big. I felt myself neither lacking room, nor wanting more. The first thing that caught my attention was the massive video screen. At 17″, it’s a huge, vertical LED screen. And seeing it rotate to a vertical display was cool. But as I sat there in the car I kind of started to get a sense, an actual overwhelming sense, of the amount of plastic in the car. Both my wife and I commented that the car felt “plasticky”. I found that a little disappointing in that sense, but overall, I thought the car was well laid out and basically like any other car, which was a good thing.
And then I turned around and dooh! There was a garbage dump truck worth of plastic sitting there. It was all part of the sustainability program the car is built on. Showing how much plastic is used to make the car, but also, stating how much of the car can be recycled after use to further put back into the recycled supply chain. Pretty cool, even though it was a mess of a display.
Look, I didn’t need the car to be some newfangled this design plan of how cars are going to be designed in the future, I just needed to know that the car felt like a car, or an SUV in this point. The main selling point was that there’s space for me, my wife and the dog, and a huge range of 360 miles. Even with the EPA estimates being some 20% above what real world cars actually returned, I still figured the car could get somewhere around 300 miles between charges and that would easily do a round trip from Palm Springs to LA, or Palm Springs to Las Vegas on a single charge. At the end of the day, that’s all I was looking for.
That’s when Adam walked up to us and started talking about the virtues of the car, of which looking at the rear trunk space I was actually a little surprised that it wasn’t more space, and not disappointed that there wasn’t a frunk. Everybody makes a big deal about a frunk. My Polestar had a frunk. And for three years, I never used it. From there he offered us a test drive, and that perked my ears up. Cool, let’s do it!