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Karma unveils E-Flex platform to support wide range of electric cars



Since buying Fisker Automotive in 2014, Karma Automotive has made all it can of the old Karma electric sedan, now the Revero GT. Karma's made noises over the past few months about what it intends to deliver in the near future, and has just revealed the E-Flex platform that coming products will ride on.

The E-Flex is already employed supporting the current Revero GT extended-range electric vehicle (EREV), which houses two electric motors on the rear axle and a 1.5-liter three-cylinder range-extending BMW engine in front. Due to flexible packaging potential, Karma says the use case for the "highly versatile chassis" can be configured in 22 variations to suit five different classes of battery-electric vehicles and EREVs, "ranging from autonomously-driven utility vans to ‘every-day’ driver vehicles to high-performance supercars." The company says the coming weeks will reveal designs for several kinds of mobility solutions, as well as proof-of-concept vehicles that could include a pickup truck teased earlier this year.

Karma's plan isn't to keep the E-Flex to itself. As Rivian has done with Amazon and Lincoln, as Volkswagen might do with Ford, and as Canoo has done with Hyundai, Karma wants to sell the E-Flex chassis to carmakers eager for shortcuts around the multi-billion-dollar investment in EV development. The California carmaker, which also bills itself as a tech incubator, says the E-Flex was planned with "applications including autonomy, software and hardware, artificial intelligence and advanced transportation solutions" in mind.

In-house products Karma could put to work at tech showcases include the aforementioned pickup and an SUV built on the same platform, both touted as demonstrations of EREV promise in larger vehicles. Karma also partnered with Pininfarina on EV development 2019, the collaboration creating the Karma Pininfarina GT so far, and thought to result in an eventual replacement for the Revero. Supercar developments could pick up with the SC1 or SC2 concepts showed last year, the latter of which embodied the brand's new design language. Among all of these, the pickup is rumored to be the most important, with a production version arriving perhaps next year.

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