Fisker's afterlife shows the cost of software-defined cars

After Fisker filed for Chapter 11 in June 2024, owners of its Ocean SUVs discovered that the hard part of keeping a modern car alive was no longer tyres, panels or even batteries. It was the software and cloud plumbing that sat between a paid-for vehicle and the features that made it usable day to day. As Electrek reported, owners have since begun rebuilding parts of that missing layer themselves, turning a bankruptcy story into a live test of what ownership means when the product on the driveway still depends on a vanished vendor.

Roughly 11,000 Ocean SUVs were delivered before the collapse, according to Electrek. In The Verge’s reporting, more than 4,000 members joined the Fisker Owners Association and paid annual dues to fund parts sourcing, legal work and software access. American Lease, the New York fleet buyer that picked up parts of Fisker’s assets, paid $2.5 million for software access and intellectual property, Electrek reported. That combination of community money and a narrow commercial rescue has kept some cars on the road. It has not restored the normal idea of car ownership.

But the same evidence looks different from a safety and software-risk angle. A connected vehicle is not a web app that can simply be forked and relaunched after a founder disappears. Owners can build dashboards, integrations and support forums around the edges. They cannot easily take control of safety-critical modules, supplier code or compliance processes that were designed inside a manufacturer and its contractors. That limit is what makes the Fisker story important beyond one failed EV brand.

When the carmaker disappears, owners become the support desk

For Ocean drivers, the first question has been practical rather than ideological: how do parts, updates and diagnostics work now? The answer, so far, is that owners have had to reconstruct the missing vendor layer piece by piece. Electrek describes a community that has organised repair channels and software workarounds, while developer MichaelOE’s Home Assistant integration exposes some of the car’s cloud-connected functions to owners who want visibility and control the original brand no longer provides.

For that reason, the line from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, quoted in Electrek’s piece, landed well beyond EV circles. It framed the problem as a general software-ownership failure, not an automotive oddity.

“We really need much more open source in the auto industry. Really sad that ‘if the manufacturer disappears, the car is useless now’ has seemingly so quickly become a default.”

— Vitalik Buterin, via Electrek

The broader consumer-tech parallel is hard to miss. iFixit recently argued that modern cars increasingly behave like locked-down computing platforms, with repair and feature access mediated by software policies rather than mechanical design. A separate Ars Technica analysis of smart-TV source-code fights showed the same pattern on a smaller screen: once a device becomes a software stack, the buyer’s leverage depends on what the vendor is required to keep open after the sale.

Open source can help, but it is not the same as owner control

The sceptic case is not that owner-led software work is pointless. It is that the useful parts are likely to sit around the perimeter. Community tools can restore visibility, route around brittle apps and keep knowledge circulating after a company fails. They do not automatically hand over the firmware, safety certification and supplier relationships buried deeper in the vehicle. That distinction matters because software-defined cars are sold with the expectations of both gadgets and transport. Consumers expect updates. Regulators expect safety. Those obligations do not line up neatly once the original company is gone.

The same limit explains why the industry’s own open-source push should be read carefully. In a 2025 memorandum backed by 11 automotive companies, the German automotive association VDA cast shared open-source development as a way to improve speed, transparency and safety across the supply chain. That is a real shift in how car software is built. It is not, by itself, a promise that owners can keep their cars functional if the badge on the bonnet disappears.

In The Verge’s profile of the owner effort, analyst Robby DeGraff put the emotional version more bluntly.

“It’s a shame and quite frankly pathetic that Henrik Fisker has vanished into thin air and left the thousands of Ocean owners to fend for themselves.”

— Robby DeGraff, via The Verge

The commercial backdrop makes that quote harder to dismiss as outrage. Startup car brands are entering a more unforgiving market, and weaker players now face higher financing costs, harder scale problems and more aggressive competition. As TechCrunch argued this week, the global EV market is becoming more uneven, not less. In that environment, Fisker looks less like a one-off embarrassment and more like an early example of a support failure that other connected products could repeat.

The policy fix is boring, but it is the durable one

The regulator and right-to-repair perspective starts from a simple point: sympathy is not a support model. If software is essential to ownership, then access to repair data, parts pairing, diagnostics and shutdown procedures cannot depend entirely on a vendor remaining solvent. Oregon’s 2024 right-to-repair law is relevant here because it pushes against parts-pairing restrictions that let manufacturers gate repairs through software. For cars, the next step is broader. Policymakers will need to think about escrow rules for critical software access, minimum data portability and wind-down duties when connected hardware outlives the business that sold it.

Australian readers should take that question seriously as more vehicles arrive as rolling software platforms. Buyers are not just comparing range, price and charging speed. They are also taking exposure to a vendor’s cloud, app support, dealer network and long-term viability. If one of those layers fails, the resale hit and repair pain do not stay with investors. They land with the owner.

Taken together, the Fisker owner community has shown that volunteers and independent developers can do more than many carmakers would like to admit. They can document systems, share tools and keep abandoned hardware useful for longer than the original company expected. What they should not have to do is replace the car company after the sale. Fisker’s afterlife is a warning for the rest of the connected-device market: software-defined hardware is only as durable as the exit plan behind it.