Photo: DeLorean Motors Reimagined
DeLorean Motors Reimagined (DMR) presented its Alpha5 concept car around the same time its main executives got sued by Karma Automotive. That was back in August. We had not heard much about that until now when DMR decided it was the right time to comment on the allegations Karma made against its executives.
If you do not remember what happened, bear with us. Joost de Vries, Troy Beetz, lan (Qifang) Yuan, and Neilo Harris used to work for Karma. In 2020, DeLorean Motor Company approached Karma to finally make a new DMC DeLorean, aka DMC-12. The company waited years for the “Low Volume Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Act,” a regulation that would allow it to revive the iconic car without the need to homologate it as a modern production car.
It had to be implemented by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), but that took so long that the engine the company chose to power the coupe would no longer comply with emission regulations. That is why DeLorean thought about making it electric from the get-go. Karma was supposed to help, and it assigned the project to De Vries, Beetz, Yuan, and Harris. It was named Project 88 – a tribute to the 88 mph that the DeLorean needed to travel in time.
Karma alleges that Yuan wrote an email to De Vries to recommend negotiating on their own. He feared the project would die if they continued to “operate like this.” Their employer at the time saw that as an attempt to “seize the business opportunity for themselves.” DMR responds to that by stating that Karma’s C-suite executives “had decided not to make any equity investment into Project 88.” In other words, Karma would have allowed the executives now at DMR “to pursue the Project 88 opportunity.”
The second allegation Karma makes against DMR is that it is using Karma’s trade secrets. To that accusation, DMR said the Alpha5 has nothing to do with anything elaborated by Karma. It was conceived from the ground up by Italdesign-Giugiaro (IDG). However, we suspect that Karma refers to something else based on a similar lawsuit we have reported.
Canoo is suing Harbinger for almost the same reasons as Karma is suing DMR. And it does not consider trade secrets to be exclusively related to the product itself. Canoo also deems investor and vendor opportunities to be trade secrets. In other words, DeLorean Motor Company was a Karma customer and a business opportunity. Karma may be accusing them of stealing that opportunity, not engineering patents.
Like Harbinger, DMR stated that the lawsuit is baseless and that it is prepared to defend itself “with the facts of what really happened in 2020 and 2021.” The company’s motion to dismiss included a signed letter from Karma’s CEO at the time. DMR claims it has enabled “the individual defendants to explore opportunities to further the electrification project of the 1980’s DMC-12 (known within Karma as Project 88).” Will the federal court in charge of this lawsuit confirm that? We’ll learn about that in a few months.
It had to be implemented by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), but that took so long that the engine the company chose to power the coupe would no longer comply with emission regulations. That is why DeLorean thought about making it electric from the get-go. Karma was supposed to help, and it assigned the project to De Vries, Beetz, Yuan, and Harris. It was named Project 88 – a tribute to the 88 mph that the DeLorean needed to travel in time.
Karma alleges that Yuan wrote an email to De Vries to recommend negotiating on their own. He feared the project would die if they continued to “operate like this.” Their employer at the time saw that as an attempt to “seize the business opportunity for themselves.” DMR responds to that by stating that Karma’s C-suite executives “had decided not to make any equity investment into Project 88.” In other words, Karma would have allowed the executives now at DMR “to pursue the Project 88 opportunity.”
The second allegation Karma makes against DMR is that it is using Karma’s trade secrets. To that accusation, DMR said the Alpha5 has nothing to do with anything elaborated by Karma. It was conceived from the ground up by Italdesign-Giugiaro (IDG). However, we suspect that Karma refers to something else based on a similar lawsuit we have reported.
Canoo is suing Harbinger for almost the same reasons as Karma is suing DMR. And it does not consider trade secrets to be exclusively related to the product itself. Canoo also deems investor and vendor opportunities to be trade secrets. In other words, DeLorean Motor Company was a Karma customer and a business opportunity. Karma may be accusing them of stealing that opportunity, not engineering patents.
Like Harbinger, DMR stated that the lawsuit is baseless and that it is prepared to defend itself “with the facts of what really happened in 2020 and 2021.” The company’s motion to dismiss included a signed letter from Karma’s CEO at the time. DMR claims it has enabled “the individual defendants to explore opportunities to further the electrification project of the 1980’s DMC-12 (known within Karma as Project 88).” Will the federal court in charge of this lawsuit confirm that? We’ll learn about that in a few months.
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