Fisker Karma Defends Itself From Critics Of Low Mileage Electric Car

It turns out that when peddling a flaming paperweight (recall "Total Karma Recall: Fisker Pulls All Cars Due To Fire Risk", "As Another Fisker Karma Spontaneously Combusts, "Green" Dreams Go Up In Smoke" and of course "Fisker Karma Is First Car To Burn Underwater"), even if it is a very pretty

DETROIT — The founder and executive chairman of Fisker Automotive Inc resigned from the cash-strapped “green car” startup on Wednesday, saying he was at odds with the automaker’s top executives over business strategy. Henrik Fisker announced his abrupt departure from the maker of the Karma plug-in hybrid in an email. He declined to describe the nature of the disagreements that prompted him to leave the company, which he founded with Barny Koehler in 2007.

Green energy and electric vehicles are an easy target for politicians at the best of times, but even more so when they fail, taking down millions in unpaid government loans with them. Fisker Automotive isn't dead yet but it does owe the U.S. Department of Energy a large proportion of the $193 million it spent getting the Karma electric vehicle to market.

Startup electric automaker Coda, which filed for bankruptcy today, managed to sell only about 100 units of its only model. That's not surprising: On top of insufficient funding and production delays, Coda made a really ugly car.

Fisker Automotive has put its U.S. workforce on furlough this week as the troubled automaker seeks to save cash.

In 2009, Fisker Automotive was an exciting company: With Detroit in shambles and a huge loan from the federal government, the startup automaker had plans to change the industry. It was going to build 100,000 cars a year in Delaware and save or create 5,000 jobs. The Karma, its gorgeous, extremely efficient plug-in hybrid electric car, was on the way.