How We Wasted Far Too Much Time Trying So Hard To Write About The Karma Revero

Remember the Karma Revero? It was the refreshed version of the Fisker Karma, a hybrid sport-luxury car with some striking exterior proportions and design and a shockingly small interior. The old Fisker company was bought by the Chinese company Wanxiang back around 2014 (though they moved the factory to California), and the Revero was updated a good bit, perhaps most significantly in 2020 when the 2-liter GM Ecotec was replaced with the 1.5-liter BMW TwinPower I3 turbo inline-3, the same engine that was used as the range extender on the BMW i8.

[Author’s Note: Holy shit, has this post been an unexpected ass-pain. I blame David. Well, maybe Matt, too. See, this all started at the event where Karma showed their new supercar or whatever and there was a Revero there and I went to poke around in it and managed to find the emergency door releases. I came back to Matt and David and mentioned this and how they seemed to be better than the Tesla emergency door release and I swear they both said this should be a post. They sent me back to take some pics and everything. 

When I brought this up to David on Slack, he denied that he ever suggested this should be a post:

I bring this up because David has been all over my ass about this stupid post, and it’s snowballed into such A Thing that I decided the only way to make this work is with painful, total transparency. So, during this post I’m going to jump in with the behind-the-scenes messiness. –JT]

Despite all these changes, the Revero is still expensive (the cheapest versions are about $80 grand, $130,000 or so is normal), it’s still got terrible interior room and packaging, it’s not really all that efficient, and I have no idea who they’re selling these to. I haven’t seen one on the road in forever. But I did see one at Karma’s event to unveil their Karma Kaveya electric hypercar thing, and that’s where I got to poke around in it and realize it has at least one advantage over, say, a Tesla Model Y.

Here’s that advantage:

Yes, I’m talking about the emergency door release! Here’s it with the cover off:

Now, let me be absolutely clear here: I think any car that requires a secondary, emergency way to open the door is a failure of design, because electrically-actuated door latches are, charitably, stupid. Car door latches are very much a solved problem. Adding motors and electricity and redundant emergency methods to open the damn door is just needless complication for extremely minimal reward.

That said, I think Karma’s approach to emergency door releases is superior to Tesla’s, for two reasons: first, all the doors have an emergency release; some Tesla Model 3s and Ys don’t have emergency rear door releases, and for the ones that do, it’s not exactly easy to get to them. This is from the Tesla Model Y owner’s manual:

The Karma’s emergency door release, while somewhat hidden on the underside of the armrest, is at least pretty easy and quick to get access to:

[Author’s Note: Okay, here’s where shit starts to get messy. So, I was just thinking of this post as a kind of silly thing, finding one mostly inconsequential metric where the Revero – a car that has been so soundly and thoroughly beaten by Teslas that it’s not even funny – can come out ahead. This little bone we throw to the under-est dog-est of underdogs will not even likely result in one person choosing a Karma over a Tesla, but it seemed like it’d make a funny and mildly informative post. 

At first, David seemed on board:

There’s actually a reason why the easier-to-find location of the Tesla front release is not a good thing, to the point where people even sell stickers to make sure passengers don’t accidentally use it. And that’s because using the emergency door release on the front doors of some Teslas can and has, in at least some number of cases, broken windows. I’ve seen it happen personally, as I recount here:]

The other reason I think Karma’s emergency door release setup is superior to Tesla’s is because, unlike Tesla, the Karma system allows for opening doors without shattering windows, as happens when Tesla’s emergency release is used:

I saw this happen firsthand with my neighbor’s Tesla Model Y back in June; it really just is a terrible design decision, where opening an un-powered door on a Tesla Model Y (and I think Model 3, too) will cause the window to bend and crack. This is just the price you have to pay if you want to, you know, get out of a Tesla with no power.

The Revero, for all its flaws, does not have this problem.

Why can’t we compare them? I used the emergency release on a bone-stock Revero and it didn’t break any windows, and I saw the emergency release used on a bone-stock Tesla Model Y and it did. That’s something!

Man, I just wanted this to be a quick post. Is he suggesting that my actually seeing the Tesla’s emergency door release break the window in real time, firsthand, is as meaningless as some anecdotal evidence? Okay, sure, maybe the Tesla release doesn’t break windows every time, but we know for a fact that it breaks them sometimes, and that’s shitty enough, right? 

There’s no evidence of this happening with a Karma and its also-frameless windows, but it doesn’t seem that will satisfy David, nor will anything short of, I guess, testing every Karma ever built? Now, he is definitely right to note that the Karma I tested on did have power, and the Tesla issue happens when the door has no power going to it:

How the fuck am I going to prove it’s the case for all Reveros? I mean, I think I can make some pretty good extrapolations since all of the cars are built identically, and we’re generally okay with that in this business – when we do reviews, we don’t keep clarifying that these driving impressions are only applicable to some specific VIN – plus, there are tons of cars with frameless windows, like many Subarus or Mustangs, that have never shattered windows when their doors open with a dead battery. 

I understand, on some fundamental level, what David is going for, and it’s noble. He wants us to be able to defend what we say, and he especially doesn’t want us to fall into the trap of knee-jerk Tesla shitting-upon. I get that and respect it.

But for a post like this? And it just kept going. David sent me a video of someone using the release in a Tesla without the window breaking, leading to this:

Why are we like this? I know he’s right in at least some ways, but this all makes me want to punch a meatloaf, over and over. Why can’t things be easy? Why can’t I just write a dumb little post comparing a car no one cares about to one all kinds of people care about and just throw it online and forget about it? Ugggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh. – JT]

[Ed Note: I love Jason, I just want us to be careful claiming one design is better than the other based on extremely limited data (there aren’t a lot of Revero owners, so you’d expect there to be few cases of shattered windows). Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if Jason is right. -DT]. 

I guess I wrote this because of some perverse, misplaced pity for the Revero; I don’t think it’s a particularly good car – it’s better than the original Fisker Karma, which I once took a minute and a half to kvetch about:

Karma has improved the car, but it has sales that are still a minuscule rounding error when compared with Tesla sales, so I just wanted to point out that in at least one ridiculous metric that, if I had it my way, would never exist at all, the Karma is significantly and measurably superior to the Tesla.

You’re welcome, Karma.

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