Henrik Fisker’s EV startup plans a sequel to the Karma in 2024, as the four-door luxury segment fills up.
- Fisker plans four-door EV with an exceptionally long range, looking to best the Lucid Air’s 520-mile rating, named after the car chase film of the 1990s.
- The company has two other models in the works at the moment, with Fisker Ocean series production expected to start soon.
- The EV startup plans to reveal the four-door in August 2023, ahead of the planned start of sales in 2024.
Before even the first production example of the Ocean has been delivered, Fisker is already promising future EV models. Set to join the Ocean and the Pear, an electric sports car dubbed Ronin is due in 2024. And the name was chosen as a nod to the classic 1997 John Frankenheimer Euro sedan brawler.
Project Ronin will be a four-door GT, and it promises nothing short of dethroning the Lucid Air from the title of the world’s longest-ranged sedan with its current 520-mile EPA rating, while also offering performance that may or may not be ludicrous.
“The aim is to achieve the world’s longest range for a production EV, combined with extremely high levels of performance,” CEO Henrik Fisker said. “Project Ronin will be a showcase for our internal engineering, powertrain, and software capabilities.”
The teaser image revealed by Fisker shows something with proportions surprisingly similar to Fisker’s first (extended-range) EV, now over a decade old. The Fisker Karma, if you recall, had a similarly long hood, tall wheelarches rising above the hood line, and a relatively small four-door cabin set quite far back. So this should be a sequel to the Karma.
Among other features, the EV maker promises active aerodynamics and “unique doors,” along with a vegan interior. That last feature should not surprise those who’ve been paying close attention to Fisker for the past few years, as the company has made it a priority to use sustainable materials in its future EVs. And active aerodynamics are becoming a common enough feature in cars by this point.
But Fisker’s target of beating the Lucid Air’s range as early as 2024 is easily the most ambitious engineering goal with this project, one that does not portend a particularly affordable starting price. The use of lightweight materials and a few other tricks could allow Fisker to eke out a marginal gain over the Lucid Air with a big battery, but it sounds like Fisker plans to beat Lucid by a more impressive margin.
As it happens, just last month Mercedes-Benz took a 626-mile road trip from Stuttgart to the south of France in its purpose-built four-door EQXX concept sedan on a single charge, and still had range left over with a 100-kWh battery underneath. So a massive gain over Lucid is not impossible if Fisker plays its cards right.
All we hope is that the Fisker Ronin won’t be inexplicably outpaced by a much slower French sedan when it arrives in 2024, in the manner Larry’s nitrous-boosted Audi S8 was schooled by the Citroen XM in the film. (Let’s face it, how did that even happen?)
Fisker’s Ronin opens August 2023, and perhaps the publicity of an EV named for the film will finally prompt MGM to produce a sequel.
Keyword: Fisker Ronin Wants to Beat Lucid’s 520-Mile Range