The Karma was built in Finland, but it was the brainchild of Danish car designer Henrik Fisker (BMW Z8, Aston Martin DB9 and others), so it is featured as a Danish car, because basically it is. If you didn’t know the creator was Danish, there are signs telling you as much:
- Electric engine? Check
- Lofty ambitions? Check
- Massive failure? Check
More than anything, though, this is the story you want to read to your kids if you want to teach them what irony is.
Fisker actually saw a market when few other people did. In the naughts, those who like to be seen, were either driving fuel guzzling luxury or sports cars or anti-cars like the Prius, depending on what image they wanted to convey.
Fisker realized that if this demographic liked being green and liked luxury, then surely they would buy a unique product offering both. As a designer he had the skills to give the car a distinctive shape. There is no point in driving a green 7-series if nobody can see it is green (I mean there is, but you know what I mean).
As is clear from the photos, the car is almost as low and wide as the Connector 2001 featured in the last installment, and like that car, this car features solar panels on the roof – though here they merely power the air conditioning. This means that the Karma is very, very low and while distinctive, this only appeals to people who see a value in it – in a sports car you accept it because of the lower center of gravity. In a luxury car this removes all sense of luxury right at the point of entry. This is not the reason for the car’s failure though.
Also like the Connector 2001 – and the Prius – the Karma was a hybrid. This one powered by a 260 bhp gasoline engine in addition to two 160 bhp electric engines. Performance was in other words a lot better than anything ever built by Danes.
Fuel consumption, though, was not that impressive. Wikipedia writes that “The German Technical Inspection Association (TÜV) found through independent tests that the Fisker Karma has an all-electric range of 83 km (52 mi) in stealth (all-electric) mode. TÜV found that in charge-sustaining sport mode the Karma achieves a fuel economy of 26 mpg (9.2 l/100 km). The combined fuel economy was rated at 112 MPG-e (2.1 l/100 km equivalent) and the emissions level is 51 g/km CO2.” Fisker Automotive was quoted as saying it “believed” the car would get better mileage than what both TÜV and EPA measured.
So what went wrong? Well, you have probably read about it before, but the jist of it is, that the car was half-baked (poor execution: a trademark of Danish car production) when launched, and since the car’s price point made it available only to the rich and powerful, stories soon emerged about the car’s problems. First there were recalls of the battery pack. Then later, it became evident that a design flaw gave the car a tendency to overheat and even bust into flames. There is an irony in cars built to combat global warming overheating, but it gets better (for those who want a good story – not for those who are Henrik Fisker. For him it gets much worse).
So Fisker Automotive worked hard to solve the issue all while fighting bankruptcy. It did manage to improve cooling and was ready to fix a host of recalled cars – 338 to be exact – when disaster struck: 16 Fisker Kamas burned up while waiting to be fixed so that they would not burn up. Alanis Morissette could not write a better song about irony than this.
And it gets better: You see, what caused the fire was Hurricane Sandy, and Hurricane Sandy is believed to have become that strong due to an unusually high water temperatures in the Atlantic, and some believe that the increase in temperature was due to global warming – and what was the motivation for buying a Karma? That’s right, the urge to combat global warming (and look good doing it).
So, less than half a year after the fire, Fisker resigned, and soon after that Fisker Automotive filed for bankruptcy. Guess who bought the estate: the Wanxiang Group, the automotive supplier group that owns A123, the company responsible for the faulty batteries causing the first recalls of the Karma. Fisker Automotive was taken over by the company in part responsible for it folding. How’s that for irony?
Subsequently, the Wanxiang Group founded Karma Automotive and builds an updated Fisker Karma to this day under the name Karma Revero. Henrik Fisker, meanwhile, founded Fisker Inc. and this is where I am starting to lose interest, but he seems to still be pursuing car building in various forms. I hope he comes up with something ambitious and electric; the surefire way to success.
Previous installments:
Danish Delights #1: 1950 Sommer S1
Danish Delights #2: 1960 Volvo Special
Danish Delights #3: 1972 Sommer Joker
Danish Delights #4: 1981 OScar
Danish Delights #5: 1967 SVJ 1000 GT
Danish Delights #6: 1987 Ellert
Danish Delights #7: 1998 Kewet
Danish Delights #8: 1888 Hammelvognen
Here’s a picture I took recently in the US, of the Karma Revero, at an event associated with the Monterey Historics. Wasn’t Colin Powell, former US Secretary of State and old Volvo fan, also a Fisker owner? I seem to recall reading about some mishap he had in his Karma.
I saw this being promoted at a mall in LA.
It’s a good-looking design at least.
I recall when the Karma was released, a short while later was visiting a friend near Chicago and we went for a “car walk”, including a Cadillac dealer that IIRC also picked up the Fisker line around the Schaumburg area. This was fairly late at night and they had about a dozen of these on their lot. The first one we got to was unlocked so we spent some time sampling the interior. The overwhelming impression was for such a large car (and it is quite large externally) it was very snug inside. However, it was a genuine four seater and could have been a contender. Back then a performance hybrid was still a complete oxymoron and Fisker had some other more intrinsic issues as well of course, but the basic shape still looks interesting and not particularly dated. Now, about that mustard and eggplant interior though…
Correct. It has the distinction of being the only car with a full-size footprint that was nevertheless classified as subcompact by the EPA, due to the interior volume.
It also had a 190 litre (6.7 cubic feet) trunk.
Aren’t there some Rolls-Royce and Bentley models like that?
Ok, at least the 1984 Corniche was considered a “subcompact” by the EPA: https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/noframes/27856.shtml
https://jalopnik.com/justin-bieber-s-chrome-fisker-isn-t-just-tasteless-it-5900778
https://jalopnik.com/colin-powell-parks-his-97k-luxury-hybrid-like-an-assha-5870579
I saw a silver Karma parked on Munich street, yet I was riding a public bus and couldn’t jump off to have a closer look to see whether it was an original Karma, revised Karma Revero, or probably VLF Destino.
Bob Lutz and Gilbert Villereal put together the business plan to build the VLF Destino with supercharged LS9 V8 engines and six-speed automatic gearboxes in lieu of electrical propulstion system. I couldn’t find any further information whether any of Destino has been built and delivered.
Death knoll occurred in the states when the unit delivered to Consumer Reports “bricked” once it rolled off the flatbed and stayed that way even after many calls to the dealer. Dragged back on to another flatbed never to be seen again. Consumer Reports wasn’t happy
Here in the US, Fisker became a poster-child for political corruption and crony capitalism. In about 2008, Fisker claimed they would sell 11,000 cars in the US within three years and promised to build a factory in Delaware that would employ 2,000 people. Several Fisker investors were high-level political donors, so the company was able to lap up generous federal subsidies and loan guarantees that were handed out without much scrutiny of the product or company. Even the Environment Protection Agency was unimpressed by the Karma – they did their own test and claimed the Karma measured only 32 mi. in electric range (not 50, like Fisker claimed), and only 20 mpg from the gas engine.
Later on, I believe several startups sued the federal government for handing out money to Fisker rather than to their own companies, which they claimed were never seriously considered for funding despite having better business credentials. Furthermore, those companies claim that federal employees leaked patent secrets to Fisker and Tesla (the gov’t preferred, and well-connected, companies). (I don’t know enough to judge the merit of those claims, but XP Vehicles and Limnia Inc., the startup companies that sued, did not succeed… that’s not surprising since it’s virtually impossible to prevail in a lawsuit against the federal government.)
I do recall that our local Ford dealer here briefly advertised that they were a new Fisker dealership, and I think they may have even had a sign outside of the showroom, but I don’t think they ever had Fisker cars actually there.
Build-quality issues aside, the Fisker Karma was crushed at both ends.
On the low side, you had the Chevrolet Volt. The first-generation wasn’t pretty (the second-generation was), but it met or exceeded all of the Karma’s achievements, for a lot less money. It got about the same electric range, did better in combined range (ironically, the Karma used a GM engine), and had about the same amount of interior room. It resonated a lot better with the moneyed PHEV crowd.
On the high side, you had the Tesla Model S. Much has been written about that car, but it was arguably just as sexy, and was a full-EV with considerable range, better tech toys, and superior space utilization.
The Karma was doomed.
Side note: Someone chrome-painted a Karma to look like an exact replica of the one Justin Bieber drove around for a while (an eyesore, if you ask me), and it’s for sale on eBay as of this writing, with an asking price that’s almost twice as high as all of the other comparable Karmas.
Honestly, to me at least, this is one of my least favorite cars from an aesthetic appeal. Most of it looks fine, if a bit too low, and then the front end hits you like a mack truck with just how awful it is. I always said it looked like a demented cartoon character and it was always unappealing. I know that price is what most people look for when buying high end vehicles and the majority of customers don’t care how aesthetically ugly it is (Hi Bentley Bentayga), but for some, that one design detail proved into the stereotype back then that electric cars are unpleasing to the eye.
My company just outside of Toronto’s border provides two electric charging stations for the office visitors. Many times I would see a black Fisker with the solar roof panels plugged into one of the courtesy chargers. Seems some computer whiz owned it.
Interesting bit of trivia in today’s global economy. My cousin is an electrician in a plastics plant here in Peterborough Ontario, a town of 80,000 east of Toronto.
They make plastic trim pieces for cars. I remember several years ago him showing me pictures of trim they would be making for “a new electric car”.
It turned out to be for the Fisker Karma.
It truly is a small world after all.
I just happened to notice that Staxman recently posted pictures of a white 2012 Fisker Karma at the CC Cohort:
In a Bloomberg article about the Karma Revero, the Fisker company is described as “the poster child for President Barack Obama’s “crony capitalism” after taxpayers lost $139 million.” The article is mostly a test drive report…and the report isn’t good. About the only thing good about the experience is the girl in one of the accompanying photos, and even in that one, the car looks like it is about to gobble her up.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-04/karma-revero-review-this-is-a-very-bad-car-and-here-is-why
Karma Automotive website:
https://www.karmaautomotive.com/revero
I’m sure that more than a few readers are having some gobbling up thoughts running through their heads!
Yes, those Karma has the tendency to catch on fire, including one worked by supplier on the brake systems. My co-worker wasn’t quite pleased about it as he ran out of the vehicle wondering why it didn’t run right, and fame came out moments later
In a weird bit of TV Trivia, Ashton Kutcher’s character’s car on CBS’ “Two-and-a-Half Men” was a Fisker Karma.
They were interesting cars, but to me the funniest part is that when combined with a Pinarello road bike you could live out the old bumper sticker “my karma ran over my dogma”
(Pinarello’s top of the line carbon road bike is the Dogma, as used by Chris Froome)