The Fisker Karma looked like a car that had everything together, which was a facade for terrible build quality and impending bankruptcy. The company that bought Fisker Automotive vowed to keep the look of the Karma, and they did with the slightly updated Karma Revero. It’s just a lot more expensive.
Before we get to the Revero—which has a price tag of $130,000, compared to the $103,000 price of the Fisker Karma—let’s talk about Fisker Automotive and the original Karma, a plug-in hybrid that will serve as the basis for the new car. Fisker Automotive had an awful time with the Karma, including battery fires, a recall, tons of misused tax money and the bankruptcy mentioned above. It looked great, but it was an all around terrible car. Really, it was.
Chinese company Wanxiang bought Fisker Automotive, which became Karma Automotive somewhere along the line, and the owner decided to reintroduce the Karma as the first step in rebuilding the company. Calling it the “Karma Karma” would be kind of weird, though, so they went with “Karma Revero.”
The Karma Revero looks almost exactly like the last version of the Fisker Karma, but the price tag is considerably higher. With a record like the original car has, a price raise is probably a bad idea.
But oh well, there are plenty of bad decisions that happen every day. Just ask our guy Jason Torchinsky, who made the mistake of crushing his leg with the tilt motor for the Karma’s steering wheel more than once the time he drove it.
Bad decisions aside, let’s get to the upgrades.
According to Autoblog, the Revero will have a 260-horsepower, turbocharged four-cylinder gas engine from General Motors as its predecessor did. The big changes come to the hybrid’s electrical system, which has upgrades to the charging speed and battery capacity. The car’s zero-to-60 time is now 5.4 seconds in Sport mode, which is a full second faster than the Fisker Karma was. As far as fuel efficiency goes, Karma Automotive expects the numbers to be about the same.
The car also got updates to its infotainment system, and Karma Automotive addressed its highly skewed claim about a solar roof powering the car—contrary to the common understanding that the solar roof could bring a decent amount of power to the car, it can really only “generate up to 1.5 miles of electric range per day, depending on weather conditions.” This would be the part where an author would do sarcastic jazz hands and say, “Woooooooo.”
Anyway, the Karma Revero can be ordered at dealers now, and online orders will start sometime in September. If the Fisker Karma taught us anything, keep your expectations low and your incomes high.