Wanxiang, the Chinese company that bought up the shattered pieces of Fisker after the luxury plug-in hybrid maker went under, has had plans for a while to bring the brand back from the dead. But first, everything will need to be rebranded. So Fisker will become Elux, according to an unnamed source talking to Reuters. The same source said that the Karma would be renamed as well, presumably to something less smug, but we don't know what that will be yet.

The whole thing was supposed to happen by early 2015, but that has now been pushed back to sometime in 2016. The car will also get a price increase of about 20 percent, up to $135,000, despite the fact that it was also reported the styling won't be updated much at all. Plug-in vehicles have been selling in somewhat better numbers than they were when Fisker first went under, but it is still a very small segment of the market, and we can't help but wonder how charging even more money for basically the same thing will help the situation, new name or no.