Morgan steps down, Fisker steps out

It’s been a bad week for eponymous car company bosses, with Henrik Fisker in the US and Charles Morgan in the UK both departing key positions in the companies bearing their names.

Both have left their jobs under less than joyful circumstances, although Morgan stays on in a business development and corporate figurehead capacity with the marque his grandfather founded in 1910.

Rumours have circulated that the company’s board was less than pleased with his performance in the job; the company hasn’t commented on the matter, saying it’s all been amicable and that former operations boss Steve Morris will take Morgan’s place.

Fisker, who stepped down in February 2012 from CEO to executive chairman of the California-based specialist PHEV maker he founded in 2007, has departed completely after a fraught year marked by more acrimony and funding panic than frontline business.

Fisker Automotive’s history typifies the drama of the ambitious upstart in an industry dominated by multi-billion dollar brands with histories stretching back most of a century, sometimes more.

All the normal plot points are there: problems securing funding, fallouts with suppliers, missed deadlines, surprise price hikes, disappointed depositors and early quality problems.

All that seemingly held it together was a charismatic entrepreneur, in this case a successful designer with Aston Martin and BMW models to his name. Fisker had an idea of combining petrol and electric power in a package designed to subvert orthodox views of alt-power cars as geeky and slow.

That’s was enough to hold things together, even through the fallout of the GFC – until the horror year that was 2012. With about 1800 Karma sedans completed at the factory of Finnish assembly outsourcer Valmet Automotive, production came to a halt in mid-2012 when battery supplier A123 Systems filed for bankruptcy.

The company has been left high and dry since, with equity partners breathing down its neck over investments totalling $US1.2 billion, and the $193 million still owing to the Department of Energy.

Matters weren’t helped by a slew of bad press ranging from news stories about the Karma’s predilection for unintended combustion to a bad rap from the influential Consumer Reports magazine, capped by Superstorm Sandy’s destruction of several hundred cars in a New Jersey port at year’s end.

Having spent most of 2013 to date looking for funding top-ups, company executives have ended up in talks with cashed-up Chinese makers. Reports have Zhejiang Geely, which bought Volvo from Ford in 2010, expressing interest in a takeover, while Nissan affiliate Dongfeng Motor Co is also looking at a bid.

While no one’s going into detail, Mr Fisker emailed news of his departure to major US and European news outlets citing “several major disagreements” with executive management on matters of strategy.

It’s too early at this point to tell whether to consign Mr Fisker to the ranks of heroic failures like John DeLorean and Preston Tucker. The company’s media people are even looking to Steve Jobs for inspiration to salvage whatever positivity they can from the news.

“Many other companies have seen their founders depart and in many cases return to influence or even lead their company in the future,” it said in a statement. “The growth process of an entrepreneur and their projects are often enhanced from these changes.

“The company has a strong and experienced management team, and its strategy has not changed. Mr Fisker’s departure is not expected to impact the company's pursuit of strategic partnerships and financing.”

Fisker said he was proud of how “the small Fisker Automotive team has performed from inception to the full-scale commercialisation of the Fisker Karma”.

After handing in his corporate Karma on departure, he’s reported to have gone to a dealer and stumped up for one of his own.

Charles Morgan, meantime,  is the grandson of HFS Morgan, who founded the Morgan Motor Company.

Arriving late in the family business, he took over the company reins from his father, Peter Morgan, in 1985. It was his second major career change, after a decade as a news cameraman before moving into publishing.

His first few years with the company were sufficiently hard to see him calling in Sir John Harvey Jones, the former corporate titan fronting Troubleshooter, a BBC program doing for ailing businesses what Gordon Ramsey does for ailing restaurants in Kitchen Nightmares.

The result was a major overhaul of Morgan’s manufacturing and business methods, bringing production time down from three months per car to 15 days and pushing profit margins up from two and three per cent to around 12 per cent. It was enough to convince Morgan to enrol for a Masters of Business Administration.

The last five years has seen a raft of new models, including a reprise of the signature Three Wheeler on which the company built its name. Morgan, meanwhile, has made a name for himself as a motivational and business speaker.

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