It appears there could be a change of pace in Tesla’s interior design team. While we recently reported that the automaker hired the lead designer behind the Porsche Mission E’s interior, we now learn that now two senior designers from Tesla’s interior team have left the company since the beginning of the year and that the latest to leave just joined competitor Karma Automotive this week.
Patrick Grimmel, Senior Interior Designer at Tesla from 2011 to 2016, left the automaker earlier this year to go back to freelancing, and Andre Franco Luis, Lead Interior Designer at Tesla from 2011 to 2016, left last month and now we learn that he joined Karma Automotive, formerly known as Fisker Automotive, as Interior Design Manager.
Karma Automotive was born out of the very public bankruptcy of Fisker Automotive. The company’s assets were purchased by the Wanxiang Group, a Chinese auto part conglomerate. The group has since been heavily investing back in the company in the hope of relaunching the Karma, Fisker’s first vehicle; a plug-in electric luxury sedan.
While Wanxiang renamed the company ‘Karma’ to distance itself from the failed Fisker, until recently, the company retained the name ‘Karma’ for its upcoming vehicle which is expected to be very similar to its original version. Now in what appears to be a very controlled leak to the Wall Street Journal and Fortune, the company revealed that it changed the name of the vehicle to ‘Revero’. The name is a combination of the Latin “re” and “vero,” which the company says translates to “truth.”
The vehicle will be unveiled later this year and go in production in 2017.
The original Karma had a 2.0-liter hybrid electric powertrain with about 33 miles of all-electric range and 240 miles total range. The company entered into a supply agreement with BMW for hybrid powertrains late last year. The German automaker equipped several of its vehicles with similar hybrid technologies, including the BMW 225xe and BMW 330e.
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- Fisker Karma Interior
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- Tesla Model S interior
The Fisker Karma had a more traditional luxury interior look, while the Tesla Model S is seen as more minimalistic with the whole user experience revolving around the touchscreen. We have been seeing more vehicles coming out with a more prominent center display as part of the interior design lately, like the latest Prius for example, it will be interesting see what Karma will do with their new interior design leadership coming from Tesla.
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What a good looking car
Interior is very nice from what we see on that picture. Tesla didn’t lose much here, the weakest part of the Tesla S was the interior…so new idea should be good….