I'll level with you: I didn't expect to be writing about Karma. Every valet I've handed one of these to has gotten the badge wrong at least once, and the company doesn't seem bothered by it. Neither, at this point, am I. There's a particular kind of quiet I've come to respect in a car that isn't fishing for a second look.

Here's the part that doesn't make it into the brochure, and the part I went digging for the second something felt off: Karma exists because a Chinese industrial conglomerate, Wanxiang, bought what was left of Fisker's bankruptcy in 2014 and rebuilt the whole operation out in Southern California. That's just the record, no spin from me. What actually held my attention wasn't the ownership. It was who they handed the keys to.

The man running it is Marques McCammon — mechanical engineer, NC A&T undergrad, Michigan for grad school, cut his teeth on the Dodge Neon SRT-4 and the Saleen S302 back when those names meant something at a bar, ran Ricardo's entire automotive business across North America, then went and figured out how software should actually run a car over at Intel's Wind River shop. He's also, by most honest counts, one of three Black men currently running an American car company. I had to go find that myself — he doesn't lead with it. His résumé does enough talking on its own.

Nobody else does it the way we do.

His actual pitch to me had nothing to do with any of that, and I think that's deliberate. He's put Karma above the entire EV argument the rest of the industry's stuck having. Not chasing Tesla's numbers, not Rivian's utility angle, not Lucid's range war. He's building for the guy dropping $200K to $500K who wants something closer to bespoke tailoring than a gadget with a battery bolted in. Software-defined on purpose — built around one owner, not averaged out across a hundred thousand of them.