PROGRESS89WHETHER YOU BELIEVE in it or not, the concept
of karma—which is central or important to many world
religions—is at once simple and incredibly complex. In a
way, it’s just the law of cause and effect operating on a
moral level; in another, it’s the sum of every action under-
taken by everyone who ever lived and the network of those
interactions. Neither of those is an apt description of a car
company, of course, but both ideas can be used to frame
what Karma Automotive is doing today, and why.
Born out of the ashes of the design-forward but business-
backward Fisker Automotive and named after Fisker’s pri-
mary product, the Karma, Karma Automotive’s previous life
is ever-present in the company’s collective consciousness.
In its way, it’s both atoning for that past and also trying to
evolve beyond it while retaining the good from its history
as the foundation. “We came from Fisker, but we are not
Fisker,” Karma Automotive CEO Liang “Lance” Zhou said.
“We are better than Fisker. That is the first thing we want
to tell our public. It’s our link with innovation, our link with
California spirit and lifestyle, our link with technology. This
is also our spirit. We will continue to follow this DNA. But
that doesn’t mean we need to follow Fisker products.”BREAKING THE CYCLE
In fact, the first task at Karma was undoing a lot of what
Fisker had done to the original car. Karma Automotive chief
technology officer Bob Kruse, a 40-year veteran of the auto
industry, primarily with General Motors, has a number of
firsts under his belt: He worked on the industry’s first touch-
screen and some of the industry’s first navigation systems,
antilock brake systems, and airbag systems, among others.
But at Karma, where he’s been for a little more than two
years, job one was fixing past mistakes in order to launch
the Revero, referred to internally as “1.0.” “Basically we took
the Fisker and fixed everything that was wrong with it, put
a new infotainment system in it, fixed all of the drivability
issues with it,” Kruse said. “There were lots of issues in the
2012 that we discovered and fixed.”K a r m a R e v e r o G T
TECHLAMPS
“All the lighting
on the car is very
consistent now,”
designer Samuel
Lim said. “We
wanted it to be
very bladelike
and strong.”