LAS VEGAS – Karma Automotive is charting a new course under its CEO of less than a year, introducing a battery-electric 2-door hypercar in Q4 2025 (a 1,180-hp, all-wheel-drive version goes on sale Q4 2026) to put the fledgling boutique company literally back on track.
The 2-seater with scissor doors has adjustable lifters to make the exotic BEV appropriate both for a Sunday drive and a day on the track, and initially will have a 250-mile (403-km) range. The Karma Kaveya, which will come in rear- and all-wheel drive, will cost more than $300,000 with plenty of opportunities for customization. The rear-drive version of the Kaveya produces 536 hp.
The Kaveya, described by the company as an EV super coupe GT, uses a 120-kWh battery pack mounted behind the driver and passenger. Indeed, the Kaveya has the look, feel and drive of a mid-engine sports car. Wards and other members of the media were not allowed to drive the Kaveya here during what the company promoted as a “drive experience,” but we were permitted to ride along in a mule driven by a Karma Automotive driver.
Off the line, the 1,270 lb.-ft. (1,722 Nm) of torque snaps your head back, but with a clean, green whirr instead of the growl of a huge internal-combustion engine that would be required to generate over 1,000 horses of power. The extremely low, barely detectable ground clearance keeps it glued to the pavement.
When the Kaveya is available for delivery, though, it is going to be trading on its comely exterior design and trackworthy street presence. After all, BEVs producing more than 1,000 hp are becoming somewhat more common and for less money, including models such as the Tesla Model X Plaid, the coming Tesla Roadster and the Lucid Air Grand Touring edition.
The Kaveya has a high-voltage electrical architecture for rapid DC charging; the company says the pack will charge from 10% to 80% in about 45 minutes.
The interior of the Kaveya will be finalized over the next year or so with plenty of menu items to make each one unique.
Karma also plans to release another electric model, the Gyesera, a RWD sedan producing 590 hp planned for Q4 2024. The Gyesera is a fully electric 4-door derived from the current Revero.
Karma is keeping the Revero plug-in hybrid sedan in the fold with an updated version that has an electric range of 80 miles (129 km). The upgraded Revero, originally the Fisker Karma, will be available in the third quarter of 2024.
When Marques McCammon joined Karma as president last April, he stopped production of the Revero. “The build quality was not acceptable,” he says. “Gaps were too wide and there was too much re-work happening.”
McCammon is out to stabilize the future of the Karma brand, which has had a bumpy journey since being acquired almost a decade ago out of the bankruptcy of Fisker Automotive. Chinese auto parts maker Wanxiang Group acquired some of the Fisker assets, as well as the assets of bankrupt A123 Systems, Fisker’s battery supplier.
McCammon believes the exotic hypercar is the right product to define the brand going forward. “This is our statement car and a design that communicates where we are going with our future products and designs,” he says. McCammon believes Karma eventually can achieve between 6,000 and 8,000 sales a year spread across the product line.
