Bricked EVs are as good as ‘lawn ornaments’ for Fisker owners
Car companies come and go. It’s part of the landscape of the auto industry. But a failed subbrand doesn’t often leave owners with no hope of driving their car from a defunct badge. In the case of Fisker, however, EV owners are angry and stranded.
Failed automaker Fisker left owners with bricked EVs and little hope of getting back on the road
So, just what does “bricked” mean? Like a brick, the term refers to an inanimate, motionless object. With regards to ICE cars and EVs, bricked means an expensive, complicated vehicle is motionless. Think of a modern ICE car without a battery. That’s bricked; better suited as a paperweight than a vehicle.
Enter Fisker, the now-defunct automaker behind the Karma hybrid and Ocean EV. Fisker filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in June 2024 after failing to secure sufficient financial backing. But the California electric vehicle manufacturer sold thousands of Ocean EVs before it closed its doors.
Now, with past automaker bankruptcies, like Pontiac and SAAB, parent company service centers and smaller garages carried on maintaining and repairing the vehicles. As such, owners could keep driving their cars despite having a defunct badge. However, with Fisker’s “software-based cars,” things are a bit more complicated.
The subsystems in the brand’s EVs required a somewhat regular link with the automaker’s servers, per Business Insider. The periodic connections allowed Fisker to perform updates, diagnostics, and repairs for vital vehicle functions.
Unfortunately, some of these would-be quick fixes are now debilitating for the EVs after the automaker closed its doors. Tragically, many issues that another marque like Tesla, Toyota, or Ford would have fixed with an over-the-air (OTA) update have left some Fisker vehicles completely inoperable.
Understandably, owners are less than enthused by their expensive static displays. One owner went as far as to call their EV a “lawn ornament.” While that might be something of an oversimplification, you can see how they arrived at that conclusion. After all, before the company’s bankruptcy, the Ocean EV sold for between $41,437 and $63,937.
Worse yet, the brand’s leadership attempted to sell the unsold stock of EVs to a single buyer. The buyer, American Lease, planned to use the EVs for fleet vehicle purposes. However, attempts to revitalize Fisker’s servers have proven unfruitful. For now, the dead EVs seem to stay dead.
