Henrik Fisker quotes:

If you think about jeans or phones or television, we are used to new brands popping up right and left. But in the car industry, we grew up with Mercedes, BMW, General Motors, and Ford, and nobody can remember during his or her upbringing a new car brand coming to life.

People feel very emotional about cars, and I don't want them to feel bad about driving a fast car.

One of the big failures for the big auto companies is that even the CEO and the top management often don't understand design and manufacturing. As a CEO, you have to make decisions; you need to have knowledge.

My motivation for starting Fisker was simple: I thought there must be a market for beautiful, exciting, fast, environmentally friendly cars. The car is probably the only product you can still fall in love with and have a relationship with.

Design - pure beauty - will be number one at Fisker Coachbuild. We want to bring beautiful, desirable cars to the market, limit the production of each model, and do so with the highest quality.

I could imagine that boats sailing in harbors will only use electric engines. And then once they are out in the water they will use diesel.

I believe there's still room for the dream a lot of people in the industry have - to design and build your own cars.

I have a 100-mile round trip commute on some of the nations' busiest roads and enjoy every minute of it.

You need to focus on creating the actual value of the company, not just the theoretical value. The actual value comes from a great product that sells well and is ultimately profitable.

When I see a car I've designed going down the street and somebody admiring it, that's a nice feeling.

A painting doesn't have to have a real usability other than you looking at it. Obviously, a car, an engine, or battery has to fit people's needs.

Any car designer always dreams about designing their own car - if they say they don't, they're lying... For me, it was never about starting my own company just to make another car.

We believe that there are many buyers who want a stylish, sporty car that sends a positive message about their concern for the environment as they drive it down the street.

As a car lover, I ask myself, 'What am I going to be buying in the future? Will it be a boring, underpowered, dorky car because the government tells me I shouldn't pollute? Or do I come up with a cool-looking, sexy dream car that is also part of the future?'

The biggest challenge is to build the team and start the company, while hiring people, raising money, building a brand which has no history, all at the same time. You're doing a lot of things that in an established company are already done.

Once investors come in, it's hardly your company anymore!

You know what? Starting a car company is risky.

The car is the most regulated thing in the world. It's more complicated to make a car than it is to send a rocket to space.

I like to come up first of all with a free idea, thinking about and obviously understanding what is necessary for it to become a car.

If design isn't profitable, then it's art.

You always have to stimulate the senses.

America's all about freedom of choice, and I really hope that in the future we still have a great choice of vehicles.

I used to have to pick up the phone and talk to people who placed orders for the car. When you reach a certain size, you need to have processes in place.

At the end of the day, most people really only want a minivan for a certain part of their lives, when they're forced to have it because they have a lot of kids they've got to carry around or whatever, so I still think that the emotional connection with the car is very important.

I do think, in the future, headlamps are probably going to be smaller, slimmer. I also think that a lot of designers will start playing around with the daylight running lights. That gives a lot of character to the vehicles in different ways, so I think designers are going to play around with that to try and give each brand a certain DNA so you can almost recognize what car it is when you look at the headlamps.

I think every brand in the world has gone through ups and downs.

I think people are still conscious about how the car looks, whether they're going to be driven in it or not.

I think the key is that you come out with products which are embracing and true to the brand.

I think we still have a love for cars, and whether you're going to be driven in a car or whether you drive the car yourself, I think most people still want a good-looking car. That's the reason why, when you order a cab, you prefer a sedan over a minivan to pick you up because it just isn't as cool to be driven somewhere in a minivan.

I think with more electric vehicles on the road, hopefully we'll still be able to drive some fantastic sports cars with big V8s, or V10s, or even V12s. Why not? If we can find a way to balance the automotive world, where ultimately, when we have most of the commuters drive electric cars, then we won't really have any issue with some sports cars driving around.

I would design any vehicle, but probably least likely... a minivan.

I would like to design a really cool watch. I've done a little bit of watches in the past, but I didn't have a lot of freedom because it was already sort of set in stone, everything around the watch. So I think a watch in the future would definitely be in the cards.

I'm not one of those radical believers that everybody has to be forced to do one thing.

I'm sure you're well aware of the car companies that went out of business in 2008. And you've had other brands that have seen difficulties here and there, even some of the most famous ones.

I've never designed a bicycle, so one day that would be fun to do.

My view is that we will still have many different categories of cars in the future.

One of the things that I think nobody's done yet is really taking advantage of the electric powertrain layout, which of course, means you don't have a gasoline engine in the front and you don't have a gas tank in the rear.

People always identify a vehicle on the grille.

Probably looking at a piece of paper and all the features of a minivan, the minivan is probably the best car in the world.

There's obviously a big difference between driving on the freeway in the desert, where there are no children playing or running over the road, than deploying it in a neighborhood.

To be able to swivel around, I think is really good for a concept car, but in reality, I think for normal vehicles, if you actually look at how a vehicle is designed and packaged it doesn't make a lot of sense.

We have to control our battery development and testing.

You can make them so small that they almost disappear, but I think headlights are also part of the face of a car.