Danish-born car designer and entrepreneur Henrik Fisker has relaunched his namesake company, and plans to showcase a vehicle in the second half of 2017. The new luxury EV will be a “spiritual successor” to the ill-fated Fisker Karma, and will use proprietary batteries made by a new Fisker subsidiary, Fisker Nanotech.

“We have really been working in stealth mode,” Fisker told Bloomberg. “For the last two years, I have been looking at battery technologies and wanted to see if there was something that could really give us a new paradigm. We had the strategy of developing the technology as fast as possible without getting tied down to a large organization, which would hold us back. Now we have the technology that nobody else has. And there is nobody even close to what we are doing out there.”

The new energy storage tech will give the new (as yet unnamed) Fisker model more than 400 miles of range, and offer unprecedented battery life – perhaps matching the life of the vehicle, said Fisker Nanotech Chairman Jack Kavanaugh. “The technology emanates from several professors from UCLA who have been working on energy storage. We have already developed prototypes.”

The long-range plan is for Fisker to follow up the luxury model with a more affordable, mass-market EV that will retail for less than $40,000. There are also plans to sell the new battery technology to an OEM.

“Fisker will be doing all of the testing, and that gives us a huge advantage, but that doesn’t mean we will be sitting on [the technology] alone,” said Fisker. “We will also be looking at selling this technology to other OEMs, because if you want to reach true mass-market potential, we need probably, eventually, an OEM. We are having very superficial discussions right now with a couple of them.”

Does Fisker’s miracle technology incorporate supercapacitors? Electrek reports that Kavanaugh has acquired an exclusive license for supercapacitor technology developed at UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute.

Source: Bloomberg via Electrek