This Man Is Singlehandedly Keeping Almost Every Fisker Karma On The Road And He’s Looking For Someone To Take His Place

The Fisker Karma is fascinating for a lot of reasons. When it went on sale in 2011, it was one of the first production series hybrids America had seen, with a GM-sourced turbocharged four-cylinder charging a battery pack that spun two electric motors at the rear. It also looked unlike anything else on the road, with low-slung, concept-like proportions penned by famed designer Henrik Fisker himself.

The original Karma was also, by all accounts, an abject failure. The company went bankrupt after just two years, selling around 1,800 cars before filing for bankruptcy in mid-2012, per J.D. Power. But despite the low number of cars sold and their relative complexity, a cult following of Fisker Karma fans remains. That’s mostly thanks to one man: Joe Ferrante.

Ferrante is the person behind EVolution Autosports, an independent dealership and service center outside of Philadelphia that’s fully dedicated to keeping Fisker Karmas and, more recently, Fisker Oceans, on the road, long after their respective manufacturers have gone bust.

Over the 14 years since the original Fisker brand went under, Ferrante has made a name for himself in the Karma and Ocean community as the go-to entity for routine maintenance, parts replacements, and troubleshooting. He’s outlasted virtually everyone else in the business of keeping these cars alive. His business even services Henrik Fisker’s personal Karma.

Now, after solidifying EVolution Autosports as the ultimate destination for Fisker owners, he’s looking to pass on the torch. But he’s only willing to give it to someone worthy.

The Right Place At The Right Time

Becoming the wizard of a defunct brand isn’t something that Ferrante planned on. Breaking into the world of Fisker wasn’t even really his decision.

“I was a shop foreman working for a Volvo franchise,” Ferrante told me over the phone. “[The owners] bought a Fisker franchise back in 2012 when the Karma came out. The owner asked me if I would do the Fisker thing when it came out. I always worked on the owner’s personal cars—I was his guy. I didn’t even know what a Fisker was.”

Ferrante took on the role, which turned out to be more work than he bargained for. But he approached it as an opportunity rather than a burden.

“They were asking me to do multiple roles because it was just cheaper for them, less overhead,” he said. “They had me do all kinds of different roles. I just took it as an opportunity to learn. I was the parts manager, the service manager. They put my name in every spot they could for the manufacturer, because they have to have somebody in every role as a franchise dealer. They put me in 75% of the roles so that they didn’t have to pay anybody extra.
And I just learned them all.”

The next year and a half, Ferrante operated the service center until Fisker went bankrupt. Even after that, the service center continued to take in customers to make sure Karmas stayed on the road. While other dealers gave up, he was doubling down.

“It was no longer a live franchise, but we were still servicing cars and making some money out of the service, because all of the New York, New Jersey, Maryland dealers sent their cars to the auction and walked away,” Ferrante told me. “And so I just built a little bit of an internal service enterprise at the dealership there.”

This went on for a few years before Fisker’s assets were purchased by a Chinese supplier called Wanxiang Group, which would later become Karma Automotive. According to Ferrante, a part of the bankruptcy deal meant Wanxiang had to set aside a certain amount of funds for warranty work on existing Karmas, so the company made a deal with him to stay and run a service center. “It just grew from that,” he said.

Wanxiang and Ferrante parted ways once the warranties ran out on the last Fisker Karmas, but business continued. People still needed their Karmas fixed, and Ferrante was the only game in town. He moved from his original location in Cherry Hill to Warminster, Pennsylvania, where the business resides today (I recommend checking it out on Google Street View; it’s the most Fiskers you’ll ever see in one place in your life).

Business Is Pretty Good

You’d think servicing a small handful of cars from a couple of defunct brands wouldn’t be enough to support a full-scale service center and dealership. But you’d be wrong. It’s not a huge facility, but between Karmas that need repairs and Oceans that need to be unbricked, EVolution Autosports is always busy.

Ferrante employs two technicians, who work out of the facility’s three-bay garage.

“The younger guy works on the Oceans, and the older guy works on the Karmas. It’s a nice fit for both of them,” he tells me. “They both have almost a month’s worth of work sitting out there in the parking lot if nobody called today.”

Offsite, the business maintains a 4,000-square-foot warehouse where all of the remaining factory spare parts sit, allowing Ferrante to control pricing. According to him, the entire business does around $1 million in revenue per year. All for two cars built by manufacturers that no longer exist.

Ferrante built up his name in the Fisker community thanks to his immense experience with the Karma, drilling down on its many strange quirks and imperfections. According to him, some buyers will only consider touching a Karma if it’s already been gone over by the business first.

“When you see people selling [a Karma] online, you start to see your name thrown out there,” he told me. “Somebody will be putting one up for sale, and people will be like, ‘Has it been bulletproofed by Joe?’ Or, ‘Did Joe work on it?’ People will call me like, ‘I’m looking to buy a Fisker Karma from somebody, and they said that it’s been through your place, and you did everything on it … it just grew to become a reputation thing.”

“Bulletproofing” a Fisker Karma isn’t just one big fix or part replacement, according to Ferrante. It’s a litany of upgrades, modifications, and other quality-of-life stuff that adds up to a far more usable vehicle.

“We tear the whole car down, put our supplied traction motors in, stiffen everything up, and improve everything that can be improved that we’ve found better parts for or better methods for,” he said. “We change the way the water drains off the windshield and keep it from leaking inside the car. We developed a better exhaust system that we have manufactured. 
We have our own control arm bushings made. We rebuild the tie rods in the back. We have a special blend of software that we put into it that mixes the best parts of each software baseline that came out over the years. We hardwire a 12-volt battery maintainer so you can keep your 12-volt plugged in.

“It’s just a whole long process of really reworking the whole car to make it reliable,” he continued. “It’s a long list of stuff that I started doing when I was selling the cars to make them reliable so that when somebody bought a car from me, it was dependable. And that’s proven to be successful. People who buy the cars from me tend to be like, ‘I’m in Georgia, and I bought it from him five years ago, and I’ve never had to send it back. The car’s been great.'”

The Fisker Ocean is a different story. That car hasn’t been out for nearly as long, and Ferrante says he gets about one of them per day on average.

“I get Oceans in pretty much daily from everything from state inspection to a coolant pump, to a software update, or door handle issues—little things … [it] took me five to seven years to learn what the Karma really needed, seeing the same problems over and over again. And we’re not quite there yet with the Ocean. I can’t bulletproof an Ocean because not all the problems on it have unfolded. The car is too young.”

It’s Time To Pass The Torch

Running EVolution is a full-time job. Ferrante says he can’t take more than a few days off without being swamped by customers. At 53 years old, he tells me he wants to chill out for a bit and spend more time with his family, and perhaps take on a teaching job at a training institution to teach kids about electric powertrain servicing.

Rather than grow EVolution Autosports to the point where he can be hands-off—something that might not be possible because of the inherently small volume of this market—Ferrante wants to sell the business to someone, either an individual or a dealership group, that can take proper ownership and maintain the shop’s knowledge base, without alienating customers.

“I’m not looking to try and retire and run off into the sunset with a million dollars, because I know I can’t,” Ferrante told me. And I won’t, it’s not worth that. But I’m trying to get a reasonable number for what my knowledge and what this is worth to pass on to somebody, so that they can basically earn back in a couple of years and then have a flowing business out of it.

Ferrante says he’d be willing to stick around to help whoever buys the business from him for months or even up to a year to catch them up on the unique processes EVolution Autosports uses to diagnose and fix vehicles. But that person has to be in it for more than just the money. Ferrante cares deeply about his customer base, who have come to trust him and all that valuable knowledge in his brain.

“You’d better have a passion for the owners of this car because it’s like a cult,” he says. “You’d better be able to not look at these people like ‘customer number 568’ … that’s the kind of passion you need to have, you have to have. You have to be patient with the customers. You have to be able to spend 30 minutes to an hour with them, talking about the car and hearing their story. You have to get to know these people like they’re really family.”

Ferrante wondered aloud to me whether such a person or entity even exists, though I wouldn’t be surprised if at least one reader from this great website 1) qualifies and 2) actually wants to do it. If you think that’s you, there’s a great opportunity waiting for you in the suburbs north of Philly right now.

Top graphic images: EVolution Autosports; Joe Ferrante