AS THE TWIG IS BENT; Henrik Fisker has always been inclined toward car design.(NEWS)

WHILE RIDING IN THE BACK SEAT OF his father's Saab 95 (the homely station-wagon version of the 1960s-era 93) near his home about 15 miles outside Copen-hagen, the child Henrik Fisker had a life-twisting experience.

"This spaceship shot past us on the road, Fisker recalls. "That's the way it struck me, as a spaceship, something entirely alien to the road. I know now, because my father told me, that it was a Maserati Merak.

The stunning sight of this exotic sports car expanded Fisker's automotive horizons so far beyond the Saab's go-to-market appliance standards that, to hear him tell it today, he almost immediately became a car designer. He became so obsessed that he drew cars in his school notebooks, analyzed every car on the road, imagining that he'd "do the grille a different way or use a different set of lights, and he somehow felt destined.

Sketching cars didn't earn good grades. Under the Danish system, that meant he was tracked for a vocational education. "Even when I started working, though, I was still drawing cars when I should have been doing other things.

In his early 20s and still without a clear career path, Fisker had a conversation with his parentshis father, an electrical engineer who sold small motors, and his mother, who worked for the Danish tax authorities. What he really wanted, he said, was to design cars for a living, but he had no idea how to make that happen. His father suggested that he approach Volvothe larger of the pair of Scandinavian automakers that dominated the Danish marketand ask how people got such jobs.

"I wrote Volvo, offering to do anythingsweep floors, whatever it tookthat would get me started on the path to become a car designer, Fisker says. "And they wrote back to tell me about how people studied design at schools like Art Center in Pasadena. And they said Art Center was just now opening a branch in Switzerland!

Fisker piled his portfolio into his rusting Alfasud and headed to Switzerland, where his evident passion landed him in the first European class. Art Center's Vevey operation lasted only from1986 to 1996, but by then, Fisker not only had graduated (class of "89) but was a rising star at BMW and had made his way to America.