Fisker went bankrupt and owners built open source car company from the ashes

When Fisker Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2024, it left roughly 11,000 Ocean SUV owners holding the keys to vehicles that cost them anywhere from $40,000 to $70,000 — and that were rapidly losing the software brains that made them work. No more over-the-air updates. No more connected services. No more warranty. The manufacturer was dead.

What happened next is one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the electric vehicle industry. Instead of accepting that their cars would become rolling paperweights, Fisker Ocean owners organized, reverse-engineered their vehicles’ proprietary software, hacked into CAN bus networks, built open-source tools on GitHub, and effectively stood up a volunteer-run open-sourced car company from the ashes of Fisker.

From $70,000 SUVs to orphans overnight

The speed of Fisker’s collapse was staggering. The company, once touted as a Tesla rival that had secured over 31,000 Ocean reservations totaling $1.7 billion in potential revenue, produced just 11,000 vehicles before the money ran out. Bankruptcy filings revealed more than $1 billion in debts.

We had reviewed the Ocean in late 2023 and found the hardware genuinely attractive — but the software was simply not ready for prime time. The irony of that headline — “Coming soon, in a future software update” — now reads like an epitaph. Those future updates never came from Fisker. They came from the owners themselves.