September 3, 2025 • 33 mins
The Fisker Ocean was supposed to be the "world's most sustainable vehicle." With a range of 400 miles, a strong emphasis on software and a price tag of $50,000, the car raised billions in funding and hoped to rival Tesla. But after a disastrous roll out, the company went bankrupt and glitchy software left customers with a 2.5 ton paperweight. Dexter talks to Aarian Marshall, a reporter for WIRED, about what exactly went wrong, why Fisker Ocean owners refuse to give up on the car, and what this all says about the future of car ownership.
Got something you’re curious about? Hit us up killswitch@kaleidoscope.nyc, or @killswitchpod on IG, or @dexdigi on IG or Bluesky.
Fisker Ocean owners, reach out to Aarian Marshall at aarian_marshall@wired.com.
Read + Watch:
Aarian’s article about Fisker, Fisker Went Bankrupt. What Do Its EV Owners Do Next?
Marques Brownlee’s Review, This is the Worst Car I've Ever Reviewed
George J Saliba, Fisker Senior Engineer’s Call to Marques’ Car Dealer
r/Fisker AMA Thread, Hello, I am a current Fisker Inc. employee. Ask Me Anything (AMA)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
What are you doing with a Fisker staring at it?
Why'd you buy bottle a while ago?
Speaker 3 (00:27):
What do I do with it?
Speaker 4 (00:28):
Burn it?
Speaker 5 (00:28):
Let someone steal it? In York?
Speaker 2 (00:30):
The car gives me an alarnt here stop vehicle immediately
lymph fault?
Speaker 6 (00:35):
Okay, well what does that mean? Out of energy?
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Yeah, so am I buddy.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
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
(01:23):
with the brakes. Sometimes they would slam out of nowhere. Truly,
so many issues.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
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.
(01:52):
Mine has a software update, It won't update.
Speaker 5 (01:54):
Oh my gosh, dude, the worst car company ever exist.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
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?
Speaker 6 (02:14):
I'm afraid.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
From Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcast. This is kill Switch. I'm
Decorah Thomas.
Speaker 4 (02:27):
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, goodbye.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Again, for the non car people, Aston Martin is the
luxury car that you see in some James Bond movies.
Speaker 7 (03:24):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
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
(03:56):
mid two thousands, he decided to start his own automaker
called Fisker Automotive, and they put out a hybrid vehicle
called the Fisker Karma.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
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.
Speaker 5 (04:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
But Fisker Automotive didn't have the money anymore, and in
twenty thirteen they declared bankruptcy.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
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.
(05:48):
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
(06:09):
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?
Speaker 3 (06:19):
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
(06:42):
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
(07:03):
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.
Speaker 5 (07:16):
Back.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
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.
(07:37):
Remember whatever you want to say about Fisker as a businessman.
He had a heavy reputation when it came to car design.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
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
(08:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
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
(08:36):
made a lot of sense.
Speaker 5 (08:38):
A lot of.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
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,
(09:00):
they would build the software for it to underpin it,
but they wouldn't actually be building the cars.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
By twenty nineteen, Fisker has announced the Fisker Ocean. But
pretty soon things start getting complicated.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
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,
(10:07):
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,
(10:31):
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
(10:53):
on and actually produce this car.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
In early twenty twenty three, the Fisker ocean starts hitting
the road.
Speaker 6 (11:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
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
(11:45):
a doggy mode where it goes down a little bit.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
So that's really cool with the doggy mode.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
Having issues is kind of an understatement. We'll get to
how bad it really was after the break. All right,
(12:26):
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
(12:46):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
What is crawl mode?
Speaker 3 (13:19):
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
(13:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Yeah, I mean, the idea of waiting for basically DLC
for a car is kind of nuts.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
Like, I get it.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
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
(15:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
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
(16:23):
and I wouldn't want to drive it.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
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.
(16:51):
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,
(17:12):
and of course all the issues that its owners for having.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
Okay, so we have a.
Speaker 5 (17:32):
Customer who we believe bought a car from used blowing
up social media.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
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.
Speaker 5 (17:54):
He's talking crap on the Fisker right, Yeah, so you
want to talk to him and see if you can
doubt or something.
Speaker 7 (18:01):
So you lent some mule car.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
Yes, a full of social media.
Speaker 7 (18:08):
And I'm just trying to get this into the right context.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
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
(19:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
What do you do?
Speaker 2 (19:28):
Then we'll get to that after the break. Okay, it's
June twenty twenty four and Fisker has just declared bankruptcy.
(19:48):
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?
Speaker 3 (20:10):
The short answer is no, you couldn't just like turn
in your car for money.
Speaker 6 (20:15):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
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,
(20:38):
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
(21:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
But not everyone wanted to get their money back. Actually,
right after the bankruptcy, something kind of amazing happened.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
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
(21:45):
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
(22:05):
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
(22:27):
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.
(22:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
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.
(23:34):
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
(23:57):
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
(24:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
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
(24:51):
that update.
Speaker 3 (24:53):
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
(25:15):
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
(25:37):
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
(25:57):
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
(26:18):
I think ten percent of them, just like, so that's
an issue.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
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
(26:45):
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
(27:07):
gets to decide how to fix it and for how much.
Speaker 3 (27:12):
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,
(27:32):
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?
Speaker 2 (27:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
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
(28:16):
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
(28:36):
ownership in general and what it means in the age
of technology.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
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?
Speaker 3 (28:54):
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,
(29:15):
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
(29:38):
continuing to move in the tech software route.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
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
(30:06):
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
(30:29):
asked that I do a real favor put in a plog.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
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
(30:56):
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.
Speaker 5 (31:06):
And there you go.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
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
(31:28):
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
(31:51):
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,
(32:12):
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
(32:35):
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.
Speaker 6 (32:47):
That's it for me.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
That's it from us. Catch all the next one
Speaker 5 (33:00):
Six
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.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
What are you doing with a Fisker staring at it?
Why'd you buy bottle a while ago?
Speaker 3 (00:27):
What do I do with it?
Speaker 4 (00:28):
Burn it?
Speaker 5 (00:28):
Let someone steal it? In York?
Speaker 2 (00:30):
The car gives me an alarnt here stop vehicle immediately
lymph fault?
Speaker 6 (00:35):
Okay, well what does that mean? Out of energy?
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Yeah, so am I buddy.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
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
(01:23):
with the brakes. Sometimes they would slam out of nowhere. Truly,
so many issues.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
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.
(01:52):
Mine has a software update, It won't update.
Speaker 5 (01:54):
Oh my gosh, dude, the worst car company ever exist.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
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?
Speaker 6 (02:14):
I'm afraid.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
From Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcast. This is kill Switch. I'm
Decorah Thomas.
Speaker 4 (02:27):
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, goodbye.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Again, for the non car people, Aston Martin is the
luxury car that you see in some James Bond movies.
Speaker 7 (03:24):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
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
(03:56):
mid two thousands, he decided to start his own automaker
called Fisker Automotive, and they put out a hybrid vehicle
called the Fisker Karma.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
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.
Speaker 5 (04:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
But Fisker Automotive didn't have the money anymore, and in
twenty thirteen they declared bankruptcy.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
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.
(05:48):
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
(06:09):
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?
Speaker 3 (06:19):
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
(06:42):
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
(07:03):
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.
Speaker 5 (07:16):
Back.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
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.
(07:37):
Remember whatever you want to say about Fisker as a businessman.
He had a heavy reputation when it came to car design.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
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
(08:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
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
(08:36):
made a lot of sense.
Speaker 5 (08:38):
A lot of.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
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,
(09:00):
they would build the software for it to underpin it,
but they wouldn't actually be building the cars.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
By twenty nineteen, Fisker has announced the Fisker Ocean. But
pretty soon things start getting complicated.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
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,
(10:07):
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,
(10:31):
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
(10:53):
on and actually produce this car.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
In early twenty twenty three, the Fisker ocean starts hitting
the road.
Speaker 6 (11:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
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
(11:45):
a doggy mode where it goes down a little bit.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
So that's really cool with the doggy mode.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
Having issues is kind of an understatement. We'll get to
how bad it really was after the break. All right,
(12:26):
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
(12:46):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
What is crawl mode?
Speaker 3 (13:19):
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
(13:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Yeah, I mean, the idea of waiting for basically DLC
for a car is kind of nuts.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
Like, I get it.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
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
(15:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
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
(16:23):
and I wouldn't want to drive it.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
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.
(16:51):
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,
(17:12):
and of course all the issues that its owners for having.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
Okay, so we have a.
Speaker 5 (17:32):
Customer who we believe bought a car from used blowing
up social media.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
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.
Speaker 5 (17:54):
He's talking crap on the Fisker right, Yeah, so you
want to talk to him and see if you can
doubt or something.
Speaker 7 (18:01):
So you lent some mule car.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
Yes, a full of social media.
Speaker 7 (18:08):
And I'm just trying to get this into the right context.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
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
(19:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
What do you do?
Speaker 2 (19:28):
Then we'll get to that after the break. Okay, it's
June twenty twenty four and Fisker has just declared bankruptcy.
(19:48):
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?
Speaker 3 (20:10):
The short answer is no, you couldn't just like turn
in your car for money.
Speaker 6 (20:15):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
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,
(20:38):
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
(21:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
But not everyone wanted to get their money back. Actually,
right after the bankruptcy, something kind of amazing happened.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
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
(21:45):
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
(22:05):
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
(22:27):
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.
(22:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
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.
(23:34):
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
(23:57):
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
(24:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
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
(24:51):
that update.
Speaker 3 (24:53):
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
(25:15):
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
(25:37):
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
(25:57):
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
(26:18):
I think ten percent of them, just like, so that's
an issue.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
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
(26:45):
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
(27:07):
gets to decide how to fix it and for how much.
Speaker 3 (27:12):
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,
(27:32):
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?
Speaker 2 (27:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
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
(28:16):
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
(28:36):
ownership in general and what it means in the age
of technology.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
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?
Speaker 3 (28:54):
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,
(29:15):
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
(29:38):
continuing to move in the tech software route.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
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
(30:06):
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
(30:29):
asked that I do a real favor put in a plog.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
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
(30:56):
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.
Speaker 5 (31:06):
And there you go.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
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
(31:28):
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
(31:51):
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,
(32:12):
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
(32:35):
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.
Speaker 6 (32:47):
That's it for me.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
That's it from us. Catch all the next one
Speaker 5 (33:00):
Six
kill switch News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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