Citing various market and macroeconomic headwinds, Electric vehicle startup Fisker Group, a luxury sports car maker, filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy and shut down all operations to restructure its business and seek funding from investors:
Fisker had begun deliveries of its Ocean battery-electric crossover SUV in 2023 to compete with Tesla, but by February 2024 the vehicle began having various problems. Some of the problems included suddenly losing power, loss of brake power, defective key fobs, and front hoods opening at high speeds. The vehicle also had difficulties with gear shifting.
Fisker warned that it may not have enough money to survive the next 12 months in its fourth-quarter earnings report on Feb. 29. Other problems arose as in June, former Fisker employees revealed the company had no plan to stockpile spare parts for Ocean vehicle repairs.
The spare parts problem led technicians and employees to dismantle perfectly good cars to provide spare parts.
Previously:
- Bankrupt Fisker Says It Can't Migrate its EVs to a New Owner's Server (2024)
- Henrik Fisker Debuts EMotion EV at CES (2016)
- Fisker Automotive Comes Back Under New Name, Plans to Launch Electric Car (2016)
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After declaring bankruptcy in 2013, Fisker Automotive may be coming back with a new electric car:
Three years after hybrid sports car manufacturer Fisker Automotive laid off the majority of its workforce, the company is back in business with a new Chinese owner and plans to unveil a luxury electric car this summer.
Renamed Karma Automotive, the electric car maker has moved from Finland to California and is working on a new car to be named the Revero, according to The Wall Street Journal . Chief marketing officer Jim Taylor was vague on the exact timing, saying only that the car will be announced in July or August, and orders will begin later this year.
"If you manufacture all kinds of hype then fail to deliver on time, it undermines your credibility," Taylor told the Journal. "We are being careful about making promises [because] things happen in car development."
The caution is understandable given the company's history. Its original car, the $100,000 Karma plug-in hybrid, won praise from celebrity customers and a $529 million loan from the Department of Energy to offset development costs. But the loan was frozen due to delays in launching the car, and Fisker laid off 75 percent of its workforce to avoid bankruptcy.
The 161mph $129,000 Fisker EMotion:
Henrik Fisker's new electric car project is finally here, unveiled in full at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Get past those show-stopping ingress points however, and you find something that'll give a certain electric car company something to chew on...
We must first discuss the looks. Henrik – famously responsible for the design of the Aston Martin Vantage and BMW Z8 – clearly hasn't lost his touch. There are elements of his former hybrid motor, the Karma, and everything has been sculpted in the name of the tech underneath.
It's built from carbon fibre and aluminium, and features elements designed around the LiDARs dotted at the front and rear of the car. The door handles are flush, operated via your smartphone. It's big, too: 5m in length and 1.4m in height, around the size of a BMW 5 Series. The wheels are similarly huge: 24s as standard, on low rolling-resistance Pirellis.
Sulky Dutch model not included with the base model.
Previously:
Fisker Relaunches Electric Car Effort
Fisker Automotive Comes Back Under New Name, Plans to Launch Electric Car
Starting a new car company isn't easy—just ask Henrik Fisker, whose second bite at that particular cherry ended the same way as his first when it filed for bankruptcy this July. At the time, Fisker said it wanted to try to "preserve certain customer programs," but Ars wondered what this actually meant, particularly now that electric vehicles are so dependent on software support and cloud connectivity. Now, thanks to a recent court filing spotted by TechCrunch, we know the answer: nothing good.
Car publications were already warning consumers to steer clear of the Ocean as early as this March, despite massive price cuts that saw these electric SUVs being offered for less than $25,000. A New York-based company called American Lease was less deterred by this warning and in June agreed to purchase the remaining Fisker inventory—approximately 3,300 cars for a total of $46.3 million dollars. By October, American Lease had paid Fisker $42.5 million and had taken delivery of about 1,100 Oceans.
That was the plan until the end of last week, at least. Last Friday evening, Fisker informed American Lease that the Oceans "cannot, as a technical matter, be 'ported' from the Fisker server to which the vehicles are currently linked to a distinct server owned and/or controlled by" American Lease.
[...] American Lease says it "cannot overstate the significance of this unwelcome news," particularly since it had already paid Fisker the vast majority of the agreed price. American Lease is also more than a little unhappy that the news was delivered a few days before a court hearing scheduled for today and says it's unclear how long Fisker has known that its cars cannot be ported to a new server.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Monday November 04, @06:16AM (10 children)
Fisker tanks, your expensive sportscar is bricked.
Think about that for a second: does it sound like we live in an insane world to you? Cuz it sure does to me.
(Score: 2) by fraxinus-tree on Monday November 04, @07:10AM (7 children)
The car charges and runs, it is not bricked. And what's more, it cannot be bricked from a distance anymore.
(Score: 5, Funny) by driverless on Monday November 04, @09:01AM (6 children)
At least until a certificate expires, or a 16-bit counter overflows, or we hit a leap year, or ...
(Score: 2, Disagree) by mcgrew on Monday November 04, @05:58PM (4 children)
Computers are no more necessary in an electric car than they are in a piston car. Note that computers didn't exist until 1947, Robert Anderson built an EV sometime between 1832 and 1839 (Link). [caranddriver.com]
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2) by fraxinus-tree on Tuesday November 05, @07:54AM (3 children)
It really takes at least a small and simple computer to make a sane car engine (be it electric or gas). I own both a car with a carburettor and a truck with purely mechanical diesel injection - well, they are fun, but any '90s or early '00s efi kicks their ass big time.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday November 06, @02:09AM (2 children)
Fuel injection is indeed superior to carburation, but that doesn't negate the fact that most of the cars I've owned since 1968 had no computers. A couple of them were manufactured before computers went to the moon.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday November 06, @08:05AM (1 child)
We kept 2 1960s cars that have engines that were used into the 1980s. We were able to update from points to a breakerless ignition system simply by swapping out the original distributor for the distributor from a junked 1980s car with the same engine. Also needed the module that the 1980s distributor used, but that we got new from an auto parts store.
Breakerless is way, way better than points. Makes a carburetted engine run better, and is much lower maintenance. Yes, fuel injection is better yet, but carburetted with breakerless ignition is okay.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday November 08, @06:17PM
Yes, points sucked big time, especially when you had to change them and the cap was held on with those stupid clips that cut your fingers. I didn't mind the ones held on with screws, but not many were like that.
Computers do indeed improve the internal combustion engine. But the fact remains that you can build a car, piston or electric, without computers in it. Remember, the first computer was patented in 1947 and took up a whole building.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2) by fraxinus-tree on Tuesday November 05, @07:50AM
OK, then. A batch of rather cheap batteries for DIY projects is also good.
(Score: 3, Funny) by OrugTor on Monday November 04, @04:05PM
It sounds like the design process is bricked. The car is an Edsel on LSD.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday November 05, @03:46PM
I think this part kills the car:
More so than the lack of IoT features.
As an engineer the coolest thing about an EV would be not needing a heavy complicated expensive unreliable transmission, but I guess someone needed a kickback so they gotta have one.
Note the journalism and comments strongly imply they're going chapter 7, and they may eventually do so, but they seem to be going chapter 11, which usually does not mean shutting down. Ch 11 means the creditors are F'ed and they may get sold to a competitor if the judge thinks its the only path forward and they may be utterly unable to get credit so they convert to Ch 7 later on, but at present time they'll be back soon enough...
(Score: 4, Funny) by acid andy on Monday November 04, @11:11AM
I saw "luxury sportscar maker" and I thought that sucks, then I read a little further and saw "crossover SUV" and felt much better.
Welcome to Edgeways. Words should apply in advance as spaces are highly limite—
(Score: 1, Troll) by Username on Monday November 04, @04:09PM (4 children)
Apparently it's a Danish company based in California. Probably the worst choice in states. Not sure why he tried here and not in the home country.
Personally, I would have went with Mexico, right on the border.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday November 04, @06:05PM (3 children)
Can whoever modded that guy "troll" please explain why?
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 04, @06:44PM (2 children)
(Score: 3, Touché) by VLM on Tuesday November 05, @03:39PM (1 child)
They can't fix their failed state, but they can try to censor mention of it, LOL.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 06, @04:10AM
> They can't fix their failed state ...
Just spend the long weekend in Orange County (south of LA). Sure didn't seem like a failed state to me -- lots of walkable streets, a neat nature park to walk the dog a few houses from their door, and, a super restaurant an easy walk out of the neighborhood. They needed a new car and found a used Chevy Bolt for less than half of new, and it included a warranty-replaced new battery. Upgraded the service to their house from 100 amps (older house) to 200 amps, and installed a level 2 charger.
Yes, they pay more for utilities, but everything seems to be working fine out west.