Karma Automotive teases new all-electric GSe6 with pricing and preorders
The company hopes to take a bite out of Tesla and Lucid sales.
The GSe6's body will be mostly Revero, Karma says, but here are its electric guts.
More and more vehicle manufacturers, especially smaller ones, are focusing on offering their vehicles via preorders. This is a risky proposition for the customer because, as we saw with Tesla's Model 3 reservations, you can be stuck waiting a long time for a car that you ultimately know very little about.
The latest carmaker to give preorders a whirl is Karma Automotive, makers of the Revero, which used to be the Fisker Karma (but now Fisker is its own company again, and it's all very confusing). Here's the thing, though: Karma is going a step further and offering preorders on an $80,000 car that it isn't even showing whole pictures of. That takes chutzpah, friends.
The Karma GSe6 is being marketed as the brand's first fully battery-electric vehicle. Details are suspiciously thin on the ground here, beyond the fact that it will have an aluminum body based mainly on the Revero GT, be capable of one-pedal driving, have adaptive headlights, feature a steering wheel with haptic feedback, offer Level 2 autonomy (nothing to brag about in 2020, btw) and be assembled in California.
Karma wants to drive preorders for the GSe6 with this as basically the only available photo.
We know nothing about the GSe6's powertrain, and that's worrying when it's coming from a company best known for making a car for years with minimal changes that they bought off another failing company with someone else's engine in it. Add in that the company hasn't always been in the best financial shape, and it's all kind of worrying.
Now, way back in April, Karma talked about bringing an electric version of the Revero called the GTE to production, but even then, the potential specs being bandied about were a little dubious -- namely, the 400-mile range number.
Karma representatives confirmed that the GSe6 is basically the evolved and iterated-upon current version of what was the GTE. It also confirmed that the reason there aren't any specs is that the charging speeds, range, battery management system and capacities, as well as the inverters and minor design elements, aren't "100% baked."
With its $79,900 asking price, Karma seems to be targeting both the Tesla Model S and the Lucid Air, though it manages to come in slightly above both of those vehicles' current price points, and even then, a prospective buyer would likely have to be pretty bored with current offerings to make that leap.
