IIRC Coda has received some
IIRC Coda has received some government funding and also a lot of private funding. But both Coda and Tesla did their initial vehicle by retrofitting an existing car body manufactured by someone else, rather than design their own vehicle from the ground up. In Tesla's SEC filings they list this as a risk factor with the Model S that the company doesn't have experience (as Tesla Motors) with manufacturing a complete automobile and they could fail at it. I like that Tesla spent years building a great EV off someone elses chassis so they could get their feet wet as an automaker, and ditto with Coda. In the case of Fisker the Karma is a ground up design with almost every part custom to Fisker.