When Karma Strikes

When Henry Fisker started Fisker Automotive, he had one goal. To make a luxury eco-friendly car at a fair price. So in 2007, Fisker created his brand new eco-friendly automotive company. But, even before they started designing the car, Fisker purchased a $875k stake in Tesla, another new electric car company that started around the same time that would then become their direct competitor.

When Henry Fisker designed the car he took design cues from other cars that he designed previously for Aston Martin and BMW. Like body styling design cues from the DB9 and Vantage, and an interior similar to the Z8. 

The car was stunning with a beautiful grill and a stunning side silhouette - the roofline just fitted the car perfectly. The car was so strikingly beautiful, there was no other car like it.

Everybody was stunned by the car, even Elon Musk who was planning to compete with the Fisker in a couple of years. Everyone knew this was going to be the new greatest luxury sports car in the world, and even better, it was kinder to the environment being a plug-in hybrid.

The new Fisker Karma surprisingly had a GM engine. Most people would never guess that the engine was from the Chevy Volt! Yup, a slow economy car made for city driving shared an engine with a super luxury sports car. Fisker tuned the engine and motor to make just over 400 horsepower!!

The greatness of the car would end about there………. as there was a big problem with the car. Crappy build quality. The worst part was a coolant leak that would run to the rear of the car where the batteries were and it resulted in the car CATCHING ON FIRE! 

There were many cars that were sent back to the factory to get this issue fixed. As this was happening there were even more problems with the car. The front-mounted exhaust made the car super loud with the engine on, they could have just mounded it in the rear with a muffler like every other car on the road, but no, they mounted it at the front with a muffler that barely worked. In addition, the user interface was really bad quality, it was slow and would creepily turn up the volume by itself!

The cars started to get so bad, that the government had to cut its funding to this eco-friendly car experiment. Fisker were rapidly losing money because they were wasting money on parts that were ordered, but never used, because they had to be replaced because of a problem. 

However, Fisker sales started to take off and they sold all of the cars they had, problem parts and all. There were way too many breakdowns and recalls to count, they had just given up on trying to fix the cars before they sold them.

After that, there was not much more good news, as their main battery supplier factory shut down after many technical and physical issues with the batteries. Less than a year later the Karma was discontinued and almost four months later the Fisker Company went bankrupt.

In 2015 a new start-up company called Karma Automotive was founded and their one goal was to carry on the legendary design of the Fisker Karma. They fixed all of the issues with the car design and gave it a BMW inline 3 turbo engine. The company and the cars are still around today. And, whilst it shaped out to be a pretty cool company, it’s just a bit pricey for a hybrid luxury sports car with 536 horsepower. That and the company's previous reliability issues continue to haunt it.

The moral of the story of the Karma is, if you don’t put in the work and time upfront, when you get the end result it won’t be the best it can be. Fisker put lots of effort into designing a beautiful car but not enough effort into the quality of building it and fixing it as soon as the issues were discovered. It’s called Karma and it will always get you back. So, remember the next time you need to make something big, or even writing a long essay, remember to put the time into what you are doing, then you will have a great end result.