95BUILDING BETTER KARMA
As in almost every other aspect of Karma’s business, vehi-
cle production isn’t what you’d expect. The KICC facility,
where new Karmas are built, isn’t your typical assembly
line. Instead of the cars moving along with workers stay-
ing at their stations repeating the same task over and over,
the cars are stationary and the workers move along, per-
forming diverse tasks. Why? For Zhou, it’s simple: “When
the cars move, the people are technicians. When the peo-
ple move, they are craftsmen.”
Even with the KICC facility ready to produce up to 1,000
cars annually, and the ability to produce an order of mag-
nitude more through partners, Karma is realistic about
the road to success. “We are competing with Aston Martin,
McLaren, Ferrari, etc.,” Zhou said. “I know right now we
cannot fight with these big brands, but we continue to put
our car in competition with these brands. Right now we
are nothing, but we will be the big challenger. Maybe in
the future we will replace one of these brands.”
Karma’s Fisker history places a unique burden on it as
a startup carmaker, in that it has a heritage to both re-
spect and evolve. That’s where the Vision Concept comes
in, simultaneously honoring its roots while trying to break
new ground.
“On the Vision car we’re testing to see what we can do
if we push it really, really hard,” Thurner said. “It should
Final karmic judgment of the cars themselves will come
with the public’s reaction to them at this year’s Shanghai
auto show. Karma’s fully aware of that and has embraced
the challenge. Thurner summed up the corporate ethos
neatly in explaining the philosophy for the updated Revero:
“You can choose to do like what we did with the GT, a
refinement of what was there because they loved it so much
in the first place. You can either decide to do that forever
now, polish and refine, stay in your swim lanes, and be that,
or you can take the chance and see how far you can develop
yourself, how far you can change. Be a really new, fresh
company. Keeping the best of the legacy that we agree on
with design identity, what we embrace, but with the rest,
start over. We don’t know the answer. I think the world will
give us an answer.” AMlook like you just sneaked into a building somewhere, and
this thing looks like it’s more ready to fly than to drive.
Even our production cars should appear like show cars on
the street. So when we do a show car, it has to have even
more to it.”
In addition to the Revero GT, the Pininfarina GT, and
the Vision Concept—and on top of its software, design
and customization, and engineering services—Karma also
plans to launch a car-sharing service and is even planning
for an initial public offering (IPO) in September 2021.
Zhou acknowledged the tight time line. “That may be a
little bit aggressive, but we are going to try,” he said.