I don’t think it’s really fair to put Tesla and Fisker in the same category. Fisker has always been trying to do this on the cheap from the beginning. They essentially subbed out the entire engineering program to guys like Valmet. It was an interesting approach, but it seems not to have worked all that well. The car didn’t meet its performance targets, and clearly has some pretty serious quality issues.
Tesla started out that way with Eberhard, handing over most of the Roadster engineering and assembly to Lotus. But when Musk took over and they started on the Model S, they took the time to build an excellent engineering team, and a really good factory. They poached a lot of high quality people who know how to design and build cars, and by all accounts, they have built a great one. It looked like a crazy and expensive move, but it was something that will pay off.
A lot of the durability test rigs described at that Ford facility are legacy relics. Simulation has advanced so much in the last 10-20 years, and it has made much of the physical component testing redundant. A huge company like Ford takes a very long time to change its ways. There’s a lot to be said for coming in with a totally blank slate and building a company the way you would without those decades of dead weight.
If I had to bet, I’d say Tesla will make it, and Fisker won’t.