Nobody really saw this one coming. A year ago, Henrik Fisker was an admired auto-industry veteran, but with a failed startup behind him. Fisker Automotive's 2013 bankruptcy sent Fisker back to his roots in design for a spell, but it didn't discourage him from taking another crack at building a car company.

Fisker Inc., however, was mainly concept vehicles and Henrik's one-man marketing machine until mid-2020. Up to that point, much of the electric-vehicle narrative revolved around Tesla, with the traditional car industry's frantic efforts to catch up to CEO Elon Musk forming the key subplot.

Driving to the story was a single, powerful, yet misunderstood word: disruption. Big Auto, ranging from Detroit to the factories of Europe to Toyota City in Japan, was on the verge of being displaced by a bunch of agile newcomers collectively proclaiming the long-awaited arrival of the age of electrification.

Tesla had been at it the longest, more than a decade and a half, and Wall Street adored its prospects. By the end of 2020, the California-based company had become the most valuable automaker in the world, by a wide margin, with a market capitalization that was closing in on a trillion dollars.

Tesla isn't really a disruptive innovator

Disruption? On its face, perhaps, but Tesla wasn't really doing anything that was wildly different from what Ford and General Motors had for over a century: designing and engineering cars that were assembled in factories the carmakers owned and operated, and sold to the public. Tesla's cars were powered exclusively by electricity, but at a basic level, they weren't a massive departure from the automaking norm. They had four wheels, four doors, and Tesla had to spend at the predictably staggering levels of the global industry to produce them.

The bottom line was that Tesla had succeeded at replacing more than 100 years' worth of deeply ingrained internal-combustion technology with electric drivetrains. Few had thought this was possible, even for a major car company with tens of billions in the bank. 

But it wasn't disruptive, at least not according to the scholar who came up with the much-cited theory of "disruption innovation."

"You could use a lot of characteristics to describe Tesla," Clayton Christensen told me in 2018. 

"They're very creative. They understand jobs needing to be done. Their technology is very good. But we would not regard Tesla as disruptive. They're trying to make good products better. Our model is, very, very clear on this topic."

Christensen, who died in 2020, was a Harvard Business School professor who in 1997 authored the most important and widely cited book on this subject, "The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail."

The core concept is that incumbents, such as the Detroit automakers, are disrupted by new entrants who initially offer a cheaper, lower-quality, yet a satisfactory product. Consumers vote with their dollars, the disrupters improve their offerings, and eventually, the incumbents can't catch up with the innovations.

Why Fisker is disruptive

Tesla's improvement approach contrasts with Fisker's rethink of how an automotive brand gets its vehicles to market. Ultimately, Fisker is much closer to Christensen's proper disruptive innovator, even if the company isn't a perfect fit.

"We don't want to be a vertically integrated car company," Fisker told Insider last year. "We're not going to do our own manufacturing. It would be stupid for any EV startup to make a brand-new factory."

Instead, Fisker has joined with Canada's Magna International, the world's largest contract manufacturer, to build a first vehicle, the Ocean SUV, slated to begin production in late 2022. Fisker also has a deal with Taiwan's Foxconn, famous as an Apple iPhone manufacturer, to develop another vehicle, code-named "Project PEAR," that's on a 2023 timeline.

The approach contrasts with other startups, such as Rivian and Nikola, which are committed to an old-school factory footprint. The risk for these companies is that they've never built vehicles at scale before. As Tesla discovered, carmaking is anything but easy; its vehicles have all endured what Musk called "production hell."

Fisker's model has been tested but never undertaken as the only way forward. BMW and Jaguar Land Rover have worked with Magna to handle production overflows and to assemble specialized vehicles. But Fisker is the first significant experiment in a drastically "asset-light" electric-car business model.

Something completely different

The asset-light approach has obviously been employed by important companies. Apple is essentially a design and software firm, with nearly 100% of its manufacturing outsourced to suppliers. In the auto industry, brands such as Aston Martin rely on partners like Mercedes-Benz for engines, transmissions, and infotainment systems.

But Fisker has started from almost nothing but Henrik Fisker's reputation and Instagram account. In 2020, the company's plans were sufficiently impressive to yield an IPO that raised $1 billion and minted a $3 billion market capitalization, which has since risen to nearly $8 billion. If all goes according to plan, the Ocean SUV should hit the streets in late 2022 and early 2023.

The Ocean starts at $37,499, so it isn't a textbook example of Christensen's disruptive theory. He told me that very cheap, short-range, electric city cars in China might be a better match. 

But there's no question that Fisker is something completely different. And if the company can make its business model work, it would be the most disruptive thing the auto industry has ever seen.

Signup Today: Free Chart of the Day Newsletter from Insider Intelligence