The Karma might look gorgeous but things aren’t looking very good for its maker, Fisker, right now. In 2012, despite having delivered some 2,000 Karmas, it’s had its federal loan frozen, issued a number of recalls on the Karma, saw its battery supplier, A123 Systems, go bankrupt and 16 of its cars being destroyed by hurricane Sandy and, to top it all, it hasn’t built a single car in the past six months.

So the company is looking for partners and investors. And what better place to turn to than a country that wants to acquire high-end EV technology? That would be China; according to a report from Reuters, Fisker’s top executives are trying to find a strategic partner that would help them get things started again.

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Last week, Sandy's furious tempest resulted in 16 brand-new Fisker Karma sedans and three Toyota Prius hybrids going up in flames at a shipping facility in New Jersey after being submerged in seawater for many hours.

While we have yet to hear from Toyota, Fisker's engineers finished investigating the incident and have just released their findings through a press statement.

According to the manufacturer, the culprit turned out to be a low voltage Vehicle Control Unit in one Karma, which after being under salt water for several hours, short-circuited and caused a fire that then spread to the other 15 extended-range plug-in hybrid models parked nearby due to the strong winds blowing at the time.

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The bad news for Fisker continues. Among the many victims of Hurricane and then Tropical Storm Sandy are approximately 16 brand new Fisker Karma extended-range hybrids that were parked in Port Newark, New Jersey.

An eyewitness told Jalopnik (which like the rest of the Gawker websites, continues to be down after Sandy drowned its data center but is broadcasting temporarily from this site), that the Karma sedans “first submerged in a storm surge and then caught fire, exploded.”

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Even Fisker cannot resist the lure of the SEMA aftermarket show, which it will be attending along with re-skinned examples of its Karma plug-in hybrid luxury sports sedan.

To be honest, there's nothing really dramatic about Fisker's SEMA show Karma saloons as the California-based automaker has simply chosen to display a car dressed in protective film wraps from 3M to highlight its newly formed partnership with the company, and a second custom-painted model dedicated to synthetic motor oil brand Mobil 1.

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