This might be the single weirdest automotive reviewing experience I've ever had.

I think it's just the worst car I've ever tested.

What are you doing with a Fisker staring at it?

Why'd you buy bottle a while ago?

What do I do with it?

Burn it?

Let someone steal it?

In York?

The car gives me an alarnt here stop vehicle immediately lymph fault?

Okay, well what does that mean?

Out of energy?

Yeah, so am I buddy.

The Fisker Ocean is an electric vehicle that came out in twenty twenty three forget Tesla.

This was going to be the future of personal transportation, designed by the mind behind some of the cars and the James Bond movies, a vehicle for people who think differently about the world.

After a long wait, the pre orders finally delivered.

And people would check it out and it would throw error codes.

Basically, the car would say like, hello, there's something wrong with my software.

People had trouble locking and unlocking it.

You're just kind of like standing outside of it, like hello, help.

There were issues where it wouldn't start.

Once it started, it wouldn't shut off.

There were issues with the brakes.

Sometimes they would slam out of nowhere.

Truly, so many issues.

Arion Marshall is a reporter for Wired magazine.

She covers transportation and technology, and the Fisker Ocean fits that beat pretty well in a sort of unfortunate way.

This car was supposed to be the future, but the software was so bad that a bunch of customers got left with a two point five ton fifty six thousand dollars paper weight.

Mine has a software update, It won't update.

Oh my gosh, dude, the worst car company ever exist.

So what exact actually went wrong?

How did Fisker screw things up so badly?

And is it just nostalgia or are cars in general actually getting worse?

I'm afraid.

From Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcast.

This is kill Switch.

I'm Decorah Thomas.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, goodbye.

I've said this before on this show, but I'm not really a car guy.

I don't even own a car.

But if you are into cars, the Fisker brand name was gonna ring a bell.

Henry Fisker is a Danish car designer.

He started off at BMW, then he ended up going to Ford, where he was basically in charge of design for the Aston Martin.

Again, for the non car people, Aston Martin is the luxury car that you see in some James Bond movies.

Where's my bedcham Oh he's headed stay right, Let's never let me do Amazon is double A seven.

You'll be using this Aston Martin dB five with modifications.

He also helped design the Tesla Model S, which is still on the road.

And for a while there he was like kind of like the Forrest Gump of car design, and that he was kind of in the background and some of the biggest sexiest vehicle releases for about a decade there, really like a legendary car designer.

In the mid two thousands, he decided to start his own automaker called Fisker Automotive, and they put out a hybrid vehicle called the Fisker Karma.

You'd think that this would be a great time to launch a new hybrid car.

There was a lot of talk around this time about moving away from gasoline, and so Fisker Automotive had a lot of support.

They had a billion dollars in funding from Kleiner Perkins, which is a big venture capitalist, from Leonardo DiCaprio, and also critically the Department of Energy.

They got millions and millions of dollars from the Department of Energy.

So that's why I'm here today to announce two point four billion dollars to develop the next generation of fuel efficient cars and trucks powered by the next generation of battery technologies, all made right here in the USIVA.

And in I think about twenty twelve, the Department Energy says, hey, Fisker Automotive, you have missed your milestones that you're supposed to hit as a part of this money that we gave you, So we're actually going to recall millions and millions of dollars.

But Fisker Automotive didn't have the money anymore, and in twenty thirteen they declared bankruptcy.

So the American government ended up getting some I think it was less than half of their money back from fitstkg Automotive.

The New York Times called Fiskg Automotive the Cylindra of the electric vehicle industry.

So this is not like a low key mess.

This is a big public mess.

If you're not familiar with Celindra, just know this is not a company you want to be compared to.

Solindra was a solar panel company, and in two thousand and nine, the Obama administration made them the poster child for their clean energy tech initiative.

But two years later they went bankrupt.

Over half a billion dollars just vanished into thin air.

Getting painted as another Cylindra is not good for your reputation.

But then a couple of years past, it's twenty sixteen and electric vehicles are getting more traction, so Pinrik Fisker decided to give it another try.

Now, Fisker Automotive was dead, so he starts a new company called Fisker Incorporated.

So after all that, he comes back and he says, hey, we're going to do this again, but we're going to do it for real this time.

Here's a new car twenty sixteen.

What's the value proposition?

So in twenty sixteen, EV's are starting slowly to get more popular.

Tesla's kind of the forefront here of EV's, but more traditional automakers are kind of starting to dip their toes in and they're realizing that one of the big problems with EV's is that they don't get a ton of range.

At the time, they were getting about one hundred miles of range reliably, and that's just like not enough, Especially in the US where people tend to drive a lot.

They want to know that they can go more than one hundred miles before they have to plug in their car again.

So I Fisker comes out and he says, Hey, we're going to make this car that has four hundred miles of range, and that should be more than enough to make EV's possible to be people's only car and for people to like really use EV's in the way that they're used to using gas power cars.

So he goes to investors and basically says, I think we can kind of beat Tesla at its own game, and we're going all in on EV's.

Back.

Then, the range that Fisker was promising was pretty incredible.

Four hundred miles is enough to get you from La all the way up to San Francisco easy.

So Fisker gets investors on board and raises over a billion dollars over several rounds of funding.

And it's not just the better range that he's selling.

The car was also going to be affordable and it was going to look good.

Remember whatever you want to say about Fisker as a businessman.

He had a heavy reputation when it came to car design.

It was going to be, you know, not only a car that was great for tree huggers, like something people were going to want to show off to their friends.

And then also he was making big promises about the affordability.

The problem that EV's still have is that they're expensive and it's hard to get a new one for less than fifty thousand dollars.

So they were targeting around the forty thousand dollars mark, and even now there are very few vehicles sold at that price point, especially like a really attractive kind of luxury vehicle.

That luxury electric vehicle was called the Fisker Ocean, a fully electric suv which the company claimed would be the quote world's most sustainable vehicle.

And things were coming together.

The range looked good, the price was reasonable, it was sustainable, so you could feel good about buying one, and they just had an interesting way of going about things that made a lot of sense.

A lot of.

Automakers make their own cars in their own factories.

Fisker actually partnered with a legendary car manufacturer named Magna out of Austria.

They have really great reputation for making really great vehicles.

A lot of people thought it was really smart that Fisker would make the design for the vehicle, they would build the software for it to underpin it, but they wouldn't actually be building the cars.

This is kind of making me think like typical sort of Silicon Valley mindset in the sense that all right, look, we focus on what we're good at.

We just do the software.

We're gonna nail that, and then we're going to go get the best manufacturer.

We know what they're doing, we know what we're doing.

This is gonna be a great combination.

We're just gonna put these two sides together.

Yeah, exactly that.

And I think this is one of the great innovations of Tesla that I feel like it is totally undested by a lot of people, but they really revolutionized how to think of cars as kind of software first.

By twenty nineteen, Fisker has announced the Fisker Ocean.

But pretty soon things start getting complicated.

People are starting to put in pre orders.

People are excited about this car.

They said they were going to start going into production in twenty nineteen.

By early twenty twenty, there are real signs that something is going wrong at Fisker.

Fisker and his wife, who who are the co founders of this company, they stopped taking pay.

By early twenty twenty, there are reports that they are putting employees on furlough.

Now, what else happens in early twenty twenty, it's the pandemic, and weirdly, for the auto industry and particularly for these evy startups, the pandemic is a really exciting time.

There is this venture capital enthusiasm for these small electric vehicle companies.

Again, this is inspired by Tesla and how much money Tesla is worth.

It really seems in the early twenty twenties that electric vehicles were not only coming, but coming really really quickly, and that by twenty thirty, you know, maybe half of the world was going to be driving in electric cars.

So at this point investors actually kind of rescue Fisker for a second, and they're able to chuggle on and actually produce this car.

In early twenty twenty three, the Fisker ocean starts hitting the road.

Fisker is driven by people like you, the innovators who know that the choices we make today matter for tomorrow, and like you, we're moving through the world a little differently, introducing the Fisker Ocean.

It's a really attractive car.

It has some really cool aspects.

For example, they got a lot of praise for this feature called California Mode that basically you can press a button and all of the car's windows come down, So it's kind of like being in a convertible, but you're in an electric suv and they, you know, they have a doggy mode where it goes down a little bit.

So that's really cool with the doggy mode.

All right, so it's kind of like a sleek, cool car that has a lot of little cool boughsand whistles.

But very soon it seems that the vehicle is having issues.

Having issues is kind of an understatement.

We'll get to how bad it really was after the break.

All right, imagine this.

You put down fifty thousand dollars to pre order your fisk Or Ocean.

Production is delayed, but hey, there's a pandemic, so you can cut the company some slack.

It takes four years, but finally the car is delivered and you go outside real excited, but the keyfive dies so you can't unlock your car.

Finally you're able to get it unlocked and started up.

But then when you do that, you can't turn the car off.

And then the next day you're driving to work and the brakes just start slamming automatically out of nowhere in the middle of the road.

All this and more can be yours with the Fisk or Ocean.

This is only the start.

I'm so sorry to say.

There was a stop sale because there was a cabin water pump issues.

So there was something wrong with the ceilant around the cabin water pump, and if it started to leak, the vehicle immediately went into crawl mode.

What is crawl mode?

So it would like to basically stop driving, It would just drive very, very slowly.

There were issues with door handles getting stuck.

People reported that they got stuck in their car.

They would have to break the car windows to get out of the car, like they got stuck in their vehicle.

And then there were you know, little issues that are not life threatening, but the kind of stuff you really don't want to see in a car that you paid fifty thousand dollars for.

You couldn't, for example, control the way the vents pointed, so if it was like really hot, you couldn't make sure that the air was coming on you and cooling you.

Just a lot of issues, a lot, a lot, a lot of issues.

It seemed that the car is software.

Again, the thing that Fisker was supposed to be so good at designing and building, the thing that made the Fisker Ocean, this specialty luxury electric vehicle, was the root of the problem the.

Car company Fisker planned.

It seemed to kind of continually push uploads to this car, so it's the car would improve and functionality as people were driving them.

But what a lot of people said was like, it's not a great car because I like it's software is kind of broken.

Yeah, I mean, the idea of waiting for basically DLC for a car is kind of nuts.

Like, I get it.

People complain about it.

With video games.

You buy a video game and then the first thing you got to do is download a patch because there's some bug in it.

That's fine, it's a video game, I understand.

I expect that a car being buggy is something else entirely.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

This is where I became aware of the Fiskers.

So I'm not a big car person.

I don't have a car.

I wasn't really in the market for a car, and yet somehow I get on YouTube one day and I see this video with millions of views, and it's titled something like this is the worst car I've ever reviewed.

Hey, what's up, guys?

I was really struggling on how to start this video just because this might be the single weirdest automotive reviewing experience I've ever had.

That is the voice of Marquez Brownlee doing a review of the Fisker Ocean last year.

You've probably heard of Marquez.

He's better known as MKBHD and he's a tech reviewer.

More accurately, he's probably one of the single most influential tech reviewers out there.

He's got twenty million subscribers on YouTube, an entire crew that he works with.

When tech companies make a gadget, they send it to Marquez and then they hold their breath.

A thumbs up for Marquez Brownlee can really boost your reputation.

And here he is in the driver's seat of the Fitskegrotian.

Screen flashes between red and blue, which can be pretty distracting, especially at night.

And I've also had the driver assistance systems fail on me several times.

I've had the driver attention thing beat at me many times before.

The software in this car, to be totally honest, is a mess.

I don't think I've started this car one time and not gotten some error.

You could give me this car and I wouldn't want to drive it.

There's this like Unfortunately for Visker, this kind of like no pun intended, like watching a car crash, Like it's kind of fun to watch someone just like absolutely pummel something.

This video that he put out went like megaviral, spawned a bunch of think pieces and put a lot of attention on what was ultimately a pretty small car company.

They produced over the course of their life, only about ten thousand cars, so it's not like there were a ton of these all over the place.

But this YouTube video, which of course then became tiktoks and instagram reels and like, made its way through the internet, put a lot of attention onto Fisker and all of the issues it was having, and of course all the issues that its owners for having.

As well as you would expect Fisker saw that video, you'd expect them to do some kind of damage control, maybe put out a message on the website saying they're going to fix things.

Maybe they'd even make their own video on YouTube, but you know, Fisker does things a little different.

And they made a phone call.

Okay, so we have a.

Customer who we believe bought a car from used blowing up social media.

This was a senior engineer at Fisker calling the dealership that Marquez borrowed the car from, asking to get Marquez's personal information, which is a little weird.

Anyway, The dealership recorded the conversation and posted it on TikTok and things just kept spiraling.

He's talking crap on the Fisker right, Yeah, so you want to talk to him and see if you can doubt or something.

So you lent some mule car.

Yes, a full of social media.

And I'm just trying to get this into the right context.

If you could just let me know who this kid is.

From your standpoint, was that a point and overturn?

Do you think they could have, you know, hit the pivot there or to the point of overturn come earlier.

I'd argue that, you know, it certainly didn't help, but the writing was kind of on the wall there.

They were having a ton of issues and there were so many things that were reported to be happening behind the scenes.

It turned out later that Fisker had misplaced millions of dollars of people's.

Checks, tons of mechanical issues with the car, terrible reviews, and weird financial problems.

You probably see where this is going.

For the second time, a car company that Henrik Fisker had promised would be the future of sustainable personal transportation declared bankruptcy.

Up until now, you've heard the story about how this promising car company went under.

But what about the customers.

What if you were one of those people who put money down on a Fisker Ocean on a pre order, waited years for it to come out, and you finally got it, and it's not just a lemon, But the US government is now telling you that it is too dangerous to drive.

What do you do?

Then we'll get to that after the break.

Okay, it's June twenty twenty four and Fisker has just declared bankruptcy.

This was one week after the US government had issued their first recall of the Fisker Ocean for problems with the car's warning lights.

Eventually, there would be six separate recalls So if if you were one of the lucky owners of a fisk or Ocean, what are your options?

So when the bankruptcy happened, could you just get a refund?

The short answer is no, you couldn't just like turn in your car for money.

Okay.

As the bankruptcy has gone on, there have been more kind of solutions for people who own Fiskers.

So some people have just like dumped them, like they've found someone who's willing to buy them and dumped them in that way, of course at a loss.

And then as part of the bankruptcy, there was a settlement that said that you know, based on the kind of attributes of your car and how much you've been driven and you know what kind of shape it was in, they would give you a fixed amount for your car, so you could trade it in in that way.

If it was bricked, which so many of these are now like they literally don't work, you could do that as well.

But if you have a working Fisker Ocean, you can actually trade it in.

They have this relationship now with Ribbon, which is another electric vehicle startup, and you can either sell your car to Ribban for a fixed price, or you can sell your car to Ribean and they'll give you a nice kind of promotion to buy a Rivian instead.

So you get thousands of dollars off a new Rivian.

But not everyone wanted to get their money back.

Actually, right after the bankruptcy, something kind of amazing happened.

Just a few days afterwards.

Fisker owners began organizing online and it was kind of a remarkable thing to watch.

So quickly they formed the Fiskers Owners Association.

There are now I think almost five thousand members of this association, which is pretty remarkable because we think there are about eight thousand of these vehicles out in the wild, so it's like a big percentage of the number of people actually bought these cars.

They quickly organize committees focused on specific issues.

So there were a bunch that focused on software issues.

There are people focused on finding parts.

So these people, this like band of folks, most of them that I've talked to are not car people.

They're tech people.

So there's a Berkeley computer science professor who's involved in this.

There's a guy who's a bank regulator in Europe.

There's a guy who spoke to in the UK who's a CTO of a telecommunications firm, so really like a random selection of humanity who happened to buy these cars because they were excited about them, and a lot of them said, Hey, I am really passionate about this car.

That's a flawed vehicle, but there are things about it that I love.

I love the way it looks, I love the way it drives.

I spent fifty thousand dollars on it just a year ago.

I want to keep it.

Please let me keep it.

And they have created this like all volunteer basically association that's organized on Facebook, Reddit, they have WhatsApp groups, basically all organized online to keep this car live.

The r slash Fisker subreddit now has over eleven thousand members.

It started out as a fan club, but now it also functions as this kind of emotional support group for people who own the car.

I mean, I've been in a few of these groups for a while and will occasionally just like sign in to see what's happening.

And there's so much of like, Hey, I'm in this part of Texas and I'm having this issue with my car.

Do we know anyone any technicians in the area who know how to fix a Fisker Ocean.

So it's just like amazing collaborative group people who are really like so amazingly stubborn.

I'm willing to let this car go and willing to devote hours and hours and hours of their time to make sure that these cars can stay on the road.

I do think there's an element of you know, the people who signed up to get these Fisker Oceans, they were early adopters.

They are a lot of them like fierce believers in electric vehicles, and they're like ride or die, Like I am an underdog.

I am part of this community that really wants to see electric vehicles make a difference in this world, some of them heavily, you know, kind of environmental bent.

It kind of felt like a sort of like activist choice to like buy this car, which sounds a little silly about like they really feel like they're making a difference in this world.

And I think that's partly why it's hard to let go of kind of the dream of this car.

But for those few loyal owners who held onto their vehicles, things haven't really gotten easier.

Remember, the idea was that this car would get better after the software update.

Even the YouTuber Marquez Brown Lee in his review said that he expected the car to improve after it got a new software update, but where do you go to get that update.

Part of the bankruptcy proceeding, which ended up concluding in October of Lack this year, was that Fisker ended up selling its assets to this company called American Lease.

American Lease operates basically taxi and ride hill vehicles in New York City.

So American Lease ended up taking on I think about twenty five hundred of these Fisker cars, some of them very damaged, so they got them for some of them for as low as twenty five hundred dollars a pop.

And they lease these vehicles out to Uber and Lyft drivers in New York City.

So part of Fisker's agreement with American Lease is American Lease said, we will maintain cloud service for all the Fisker Oceans that are out there.

And cloud service is so important for any car these days because so many cars are kind of underpinned by software, but especially for the Fisker Ocean because so much of it needs software updates all the time.

So they agree to keep connected services active for these private owners.

But to my understanding, there was a trouble actually signing the contract, so they kind of men into it verbally but didn't really put anything in writing, so it's kind of handshake.

They have a another company take over the software platform and they end up pushing a bunch of updates to these Fiskers and it bricks, like I think ten percent of them, just like, so that's an issue.

Right, by the way, this isn't just an issue with Fisker or even with evs in general.

The whole software update brick in your car thing.

That's very unusual.

But software is creeping more and more into our cars, and so are the upsales.

A couple of years back, BMW try to charge eighteen dollars a month for unlocking the ability to heat up your seats.

Volkswagen just announced a subscription to allow people to unlock the full power of the engine that's already in your car for twenty two bucks a month.

Things like parking assistance is getting locked behind paywall, and if something goes wrong with that software, you can't just pop the hood and fix it yourself.

You have to go back to the car company, who gets to decide how to fix it and for how much.

Part of these right to repair issues.

Is like I own this, Yeah, so I want to be able to like fix it, and I don't want to have to depend on anyone else to operate my vehicle.

Because if I'm depending on this random Uber and Lyft operator in New York City to fix my car so that it works, like, do I really own my car or am I just basically like renting it?

If I don't own the software that underpins it, is it my car?

There is something that almost seems sacrilegious about if General Motors goes under tomorrow, I can't fix my own General Motors car.

There's something that's fundamentally seems wrong about that to me.

But it looks like that's the way we're headed.

Yeah, I mean, this is like the big question that I'm so interested in because, especially as cars incorporate more and more software, there's something like fifteen hundred computer chips in the average EV these days.

There's so much software that goes into these things, so many things that are controlled by software.

I think this is a question that's going to keep coming up, and it'll be interesting to see whether through the trials and tribulations of Fisker Ocean owners and there's really only kind of like a handful of them that you know, maybe maybe five thousand of them at this point.

Can we get at some of these bigger questions about not only car ownership, but like ownership in general and what it means in the age of technology.

What do you think the car market is going to look like in the next five, ten, whatever years.

Are we going to be seeing more cars that are everything is software and you can't get into it, and something like this could happen?

Yeah, I think.

I mean, it's a really hard question to answer specifically right now, especially in the US, because we're undergoing so many crazy changes.

But I will say that this idea that was pioneered by Tesla, that you really start car manufacturing with the software is here to stay, not only because of Tesla, but because of things we're seeing in China, where they are the kind of undisputed kings of electric vehicles.

They're pumping out tons of electric vehicles all the time and selling them all over the world, and these are like cheap, good electric vehicles.

And it's because of this kind of real tight relationship now between technology and automaking.

So definitely, I think automatingiss kind of continuing to move in the tech software route.

If you've been listening for a while, you know that I keep going back and forth on maybe I should buy a car, maybe I shouldn't, And this episode is pushing me toward the I should not buy one end.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I love computers.

I love adding technology to stuff.

I just don't want to be on a road trip and an over the air update bricks my ride home.

But the thing that really hit me in this whole saga is the fact that people have come together to create this community that is kind of part trauma bonding and part tech support.

People who had nothing in common other than that they bought this not very good car.

Stuff like this is always going to be fascinating to me.

And I'm not the only one.

Arian is also interested in this, and she asked that I do a real favor put in a plog.

If you own a Fisker Ocean I would like to talk to I'm collecting them.

I'm so fascinated by these people and the folks who are like I was living a normal life that I got this car, and now I've become obsessed.

Like a lot of that you know I was like a normal software engineer or like a normal dentist and wasn't even that into cars, and now this is like what I do with all my free time, and it's like a a story of obsession.

It's kind of amazing.

And there you go.

If you have a Fisker and you want to reach out to Arion, you can find her info in the show notes.

Thank you so much for listening to another episode of kill Switch.

I hope you dug this one.

If you want to connect with us outside of this audio space that we've just shared, we're on Instagram at kill switch pod, or you could even email us at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope dot NYC.

And while you got your phone in your hand wherever you're listening to this, maybe even leave us a review.

It helps other people find the show, which in turn helps us keep doing our thing.

Kill Switch is hosted by Me Dexter Thomas.

It's produced by Sena Ozaki, Darluck Potts and Kate Osborne and this week we have production help from Alexander beld A theme song is by me and Kyle Murdoch, and Kyle also mixed the show from Kaleidoscope.

Our executive producers are Ozma Lashin, Mungesh had Togadur and Kate Osborne.

From iHeart Our executive producers are Katrina Norville and Nikki Etor.

And by the way, if you go to the Fisker subreddit, one of the all time top posts is from March to last year.

So just before the bankruptcy, a user named Nickelback fan Club you can't make this up.

Nickelback fan Club made a post saying, quote, hello, I am a current Fisker Incorporated employee.

Ask me anything, and this whole thread is wild.

People including the anonymous employee, are trashing the company owners, giving out tech advice, thanking the employee for their hard work, and again it's just weird trauma bonding.

It's fascinating.

I'll put it in the show notes if you want to check it out anyway.

That's it for me.

That's it from us.

Catch all the next one

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