Luxury plug-in automaker Fisker has not had a good year.  Adding to a string of bad news over the past few months, approximately 300 new, completed Karma sedans were sitting at their port in New Jersey when Sandy hit.  (The Karma is built in Finland by Valmet).  The cars were apparently waiting for dealers to pick them up, and were ruined.  Total losses.  What’s more, 16 of the cars caught fire when seawater shorted their 12 volt batteries (not their large Lithium-ion traction batteries), then high winds spread the fire to other cars.  Several other non-hybrids at the port, including some Toyotas, also caught fire from the same series of events.  Still, even though it’s not related to the traction battery, searching for karma fire (no quotes) in Google yields 49 million results.

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