Fisker Karma Video

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Fisker Karma
Created: 01/17/2008
Video description: The guy who designed BMW's Z8 has a greener idea. Get a first look at the Fisker Karma from the 2008 Detroit auto show.

Fisker Karma Video Transcript

[ music ] ^M00:00:07 [ background music ]

>> Looks like a million bucks, doesn't it? Would you believe around eighty grand? This Fisker Karma is going to be an interest blend of luxury, sport, and green. So here's how it works. You see it's a, it's a two plus two coupe with some great lines. You see a little bit of Z8 up front because Heinrich Fisker, the guy behind this car used to design for BMW, and used to work on their cars also as an after market tuner kinda guy. Then he met up with a battery company doing military lithium ion, and said you know what? That belongs in a car. And here's what they're gonna do. Now the Karma is a plug in hybrid, so you plug it in overnight, it's a typical model 110 or 220. That gets you about a fifty mile charge on the battery pack. When that depletes, the car goes into hybrid mode. So it's running gas and electric, recharging the battery a bit, running off a gas engine. They haven't specked out the gas engine very much yet, they're still gonna source that. But it's gonna be a lean burn inline four, not some big monstrous V8, though you might expect that in a car that looks like this. And of course it's got a very luxurious, kind of a big presence to it. So it really takes a left turn from what we usually think of as a lean green car. Another piece of technology here along those lines is a solar charging roof panel, which does a couple of things. It'll trickle charge battery to get you a little more range, not a whole lot. But it also powers some blowers that can cool down those notoriously hot lithium ion packs. [ background music ] When they're delivering power hard to the powertrain, they really generate a lot of heat. That's no exaggeration. Karma's not due on the market until Q4 '09. ^M00:01:34 [ music ]

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