Last night, Fisker Automotive, maker of the luxury Karma electric vehicle, unveiled its new car, the Atlantic, which was previously known as Project Nina. The car, which is expected to cost about half as much as the Karma—or around $50,000—is meant to make the company a mass-market automaker.

But there are strong doubts about whether the company will bring the car to market and, if it does, whether the car will be built in the United States as originally intended. The company had been counting on a U.S. Department of Energy loan to build a factory for manufacturing the car, but those funds were frozen after Fisker failed to meet milestones specified by the terms of the loan.

In addition to losing access to the approximately $300 million it had yet to draw from its DOE loan, the company has had a number of other setbacks recently. Those include the failure of the Karma that Consumer Reports was testing, which turned out to be the result of a bad battery pack from A123 Systems. A123 Systems is now replacing the battery packs in about 700 Karma sedans.

Fisker’s new CEO, Tom LaSorda, told reporters last night that the company is planning to go forward with production of the new car even without the DOE funds, although it may build the car outside of the United States. The company recently closed a nearly $400 million round of private financing, bringing the total investment to over $1 billion. He said the company is looking for more private investment, possibly in the form of a strategic partnership.

Fisker is also negotiating with DOE to have the terms of the loan changed, but that could be difficult given the pressure DOE is under after it changed the terms of a loan to Solyndra, which later went out of business and became a political lightning rod.

If Fisker fails to bring in the additional financing it needs, and it folds, does that matter? Fisker’s announcement last night drew heavy press attention, generating nearly 200 articles (including this one). And that raises the question of why so many people seem to care about the fate of this small, though heavily funded, company.

At one point, its success might have helped determine whether electric vehicles would catch on. But no longer. When Fisker was founded in 2007, the only well-known electric-car maker was Tesla, whose Roadster may have helped inspire GM to produce its electric Volt. But now every major automaker is selling, or has plans to sell, an electric vehicle. Fisker aimed to sell its car before GM brought the Volt to market, but GM beat it, and has now sold more than 11,500 Volts, compared to about 700 Fisker Karmas, which went on sale a year after the Volt. GM’s news yesterday of record monthly Volt sales probably matters more to electric vehicles than Fisker’s announcement last night.

If Fisker fails, it won’t doom electric vehicles. But it would mean that the world would have fewer extremely cool-looking cars.

If, on the other hand, Fisker succeeds, maybe it will convince automakers like GM that people actually want fast electric cars (the Karma does 0 to 60 in 6.3 seconds), rather than the dialed-down versions they’re selling now. Then again, Tesla, whose cars are even faster, might do a better job making that argument.

An Amyris demonstration facility in Brazil. Credit: Noah Friedman-Rudovsky.

[See update below.]

In its early years, biotech company Amyris described itself as a start-up “applying its proprietary breakthrough technologies to address major global health and energy challenges.” 

Its originally planned to make an anti-malaria drug, as well as renewable diesel and jet fuel, by feeding sugar to genetically-engineered microorganisms. Having spun off the anti-malaria technology to another company in 2008, yesterday Amyris said it’s giving up making fuels too. Instead, it will to focus on higher value products, such as moisturizers for cosmetics.  

The company learned firsthand just how difficult it is to achieve the kind of yields seen in lab tests in large-scale production. In an update call for investors, CEO John Melo said he is “humbled by the lessons we have learned.”

This is a common theme for advanced biofuels companies. Range Fuels, one of the first of the current crop of companies, recently went out of business. Others are giving up on making biofuels too, also hoping to break into markets for higher value chemicals. Although they may be able to get more money per liter of product, some experts warn that these markets are also highly competitive.

Amyris’s technology may still be used to make renewable fuels, but this will happen not at Amyris, but under joint ventures established with Total and Cosan. These ventures will need to build up their own production capacity, Melo told analysts.

On the same call, Melo told investors not to expect the company to produce as much product as it had previously promised. Amyris had said that in 2012 it would produce 40 to 50 million liters of farnesene, a fragrant oil that can be used for making various products including diesel. Melo said Amyris would stop making predictions about its production levels, turning its attention away from ramping up production and toward achieving consistent yields. He also said Amyris is indefinitely delaying plans for one of two large production facilities it was to have built this year. 

Not all biofuels companies are backing off from biofuels though. Mascoma, which has developed a process for making ethanol from cellulosic sources such as wood chips, announced in December that it had fully funded the construction of a cellulosic ethanol plant. Construction is expected to begin within a few months, to be completed by the end of 2013.

Update, 2/14/2012 :

Amyris wants to make clear that it isn’t giving up on its current, relatively small scale, biofuel production. Some of the farnesene Amyris makes is being used to make diesel fuel for buses in Brazil, and Amyris will continue to make farnesene for fuel until the joint ventures are up and running, says Joel Velasco, senior vice president for external relations. As Amyris adds more farnesene capacity this year, some of that, too, could be used for the production of fuel, he says.

While Amyris doesn’t disclose precisely how much fuel is made from its farnesene, based on the number of buses it supplies, Amyris seems to be making a few hundred thousand liters of fuel per year. Commercial fuel production, to make economic sense, typically needs to be on a much larger scale—hundreds of millions of liters per year.

Amyris had generated excitement in recent months when it announced would produce 40 to 50 million liters of farnesene in 2012, and build two plants with a total capacity of 150 million liters. Although Amyris had made clear that not all of the production would go to biofuels, the plants were some rare positive news in the advanced biofuels industry, which has been plagued by bankruptcies and delays.

But now Amyris has given up on its 40 to 50 million liter prediction, and indefinitely delayed construction on the larger of the two plants it had planned. Large scale biofuels production awaits construction of facilities by the joint venture companies. That construction seems unlikely to happen in the near term in light of the difficulties Amyris is having in achieving its announced goals this year. The promise of large scale biofuels is still some time off. 

A Volt outside GM's headquarters in Detroit. Credit: Flickr / Landlessness.

Electric vehicle enthusiasts (and critics) are keeping a close eye on sales of GM’s Volt this year to get a sense of whether electric vehicles will really finally catch on. GM has said that it hopes to sell 30,000 Volts in 2012, which would mean selling, on average 2,500 a month. It’s far short of that pace for January having sold just 603.

The January figure markedly down from December, when GM delivered 1,520. But sales were actually up substantially from the same time last year, when GM sold 321 of the cars—however, at that time, the Volt was only available in a few states. 

GM didn’t meet its goal of selling 10,000 Volts during 2011, for a number of reasons. In fact, it’s still short of 10,000, with total deliveries of 8,600 vehicles since sales began at the end of 2010.

So, do slow sales in January mean GM won't reach its goal?

There are a number of factors that could explain the slow January sales. Customers hoping to get the Federal tax credit for the car for the 2011 tax year may have rushed to buy in December. Also, at the beginning of January, GM announced a retrofit that will make the car safer. The cars on the lots in January (about 4,400 were there at the beginning of the month) were not retrofitted yet, and the parts needed to do the retrofits weren't widely available. So anyone buying a car in January would have to take it back in a month or two to have the changes made. GM also announced in January that cars built later this year would have low enough emissions to qualify for driving in California’s HOV lanes, an attractive perk.

All in all, potential customers had a lot of reasons to wait until later this year to buy a Volt. It’s too early to call whether the company could sell 30,000 this year. It’s also too early to say how important sales of the Volt are, at least in terms of the overall prospects for electric vehicles. But I’d be interested to hear what readers think. How much is riding on the success of the Volt this year?