Karma Automotive's next vehicle won't be the Atlantic, a coupe or a convertible, but it will be muscular

• Last fall, Karma was saying that its 550,000-square-foot factory in Moreno Valley, California would be up and running about now. But the timeline has turned into a more vague "some time in 2017," so we'll just have to wait for new about the start of actual production. Karma has run a few pre-production prototypes through the machines, and took 8-10 of them on a tour for prospective buyers in all the cities where the car will be sold (see the list here).
• On that tour, interested buyers were able to take the cars on test drives. "We wrung these cars out, in all kinds of weather," Oleston said, and none of them had a problem. We expect a spokesperson to give us the positive side of the story, but we'll take him at his word when he says that Karma engineers were expecting lots of problems, and were instead pleasantly surprised.
• The car itself remains pretty much the same as we're seen before, with 981 foot-pounds of torque and a top speed of about 128 miles an hour. Twenty-two-inch wheels are standard. The whole thing weighs about 5,400 pounds, so it's not going to win awards at the drag strip, but the more rigid chassis makes the Revero an excellent long-distance tourer, Oleston said, saying that he's spent thousands of miles behind the wheel.
• Oleston said that while the upcoming factory will be able to make more, if Karma sells about 2,000 Reveros, maybe 1,000 of them in the first year, that'd meet the company's expectations.
• As for the Karma model that's coming after the Revero, it will not be the Atlantic. Oleston said that the designers are working on "quite a few project," including ideas that take the "feline muscularity" of the Revero and crank it up a notch. Other than that, he would only hint at Karma's next model: "It's not a coupe, it's not a convertible. That's all I should say right now." More information will be coming in a few years, he said.
• The Revero's infotainment is getting a major overhaul. We knew this, and that it will have Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. You can see more in the video below.

By Sebastian Blanco