Your Fisker Karma is ready, Mr Di Caprio

The firts Fisker Karma is off to Leonardo di Caprio - without the leggy passenger

The Fisker Karma has been on its way for what seems a very long time. But finally, Henrik Fisker’s eponymous company is delivering what it’s been promising, and the first recipient later this month of the Karma will be Leonardo di Caprio.

Henrik Fisker has a few more famous faces in his 3,000 order bank including Al Gore (former vice President and the man with the disingenuous climate-change campaign to his credit) and Colin Powell (best know for the Gulf war and being the only man called Colin who can’t pronounce his own name). But it’s the real orders that count.

And having an order bank of 3,000 orders for an unproven car that’s going to cost the best part of £100k in the UK is no mean feat. But the Karma does seem to offer a quite appealing package, particularly if you can have the Karma as a company car.

In the UK that would mean no BIK for the time being which, for what is a proper high-end luxury sports saloon, is hugely appealing. And Henrik Fisker has form for doing decent cars, having being an Aston Martin design man before he went off to run his own game, so the looks are there too.

The Karma offers a plug-in range of around 50 miles but a range-extender 2.o litre turbo offering back-up charge once the plug-in juice has gone. So you should, in theory, get the best of both worlds.

Economy is quoted as something daft like 80mpg with emissions of 83g/km which, for a car probably best compared to a Mercedes CLS, is astonishing. You won’t get that of course – nothing like – but that’s the fault of the daft official figures, not Fisker.

Fisker are initially building the Karma at the Valmet production plant in Finland where they plan to have racked production up to 300 cars a week by November, although they are managing just a handful a week at the moment.

Eventually, production will move to the US when Fisker’s smaller range-extender – Project Nina – comes to fruition in 2013 with plans to make the 3-Series size Nina at the rate of 100,000 a year.

Big plans, but it does all seem to be coming together for Henrik Fisker.

(17 photos – click any thumbnail for full gallery)

By Cars UK