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Fisker lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments for months
- bragr 3y ago>In a few cases, it delivered vehicles without collecting any form of payment at all That's crazy. I'm curious what happened in those instances. I suppose it depends a lot on the jurisdiction, but can Fisker come back and demand payment, or did those people just get free cars?
- foobarian 3y agoI was utterly confused until I realized this is not Fisk*a*r the scissor maker.
- moogly 3y agoFiskars
- kayodelycaon 3y agoFor something as valuable as a car, they definitely can. You still agreed to pay them. However, you can decide to take the whole thing to court and see what a judge thinks about it. In a way, they screwed up and that may affect the contract.
- Atotalnoob 3y agoThey might have a case to keep the car! There are laws around sending people packages and then demanding payment. I think it was to stop trolls from mailing you garbage and demanding payment afterwards… I’m not a lawyer, them having a purchase agreement in place probably changes things, but a clever lawyer might be able to make a case
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoHow are they going to register without a title?
- recursive 3y agoUnregistered car fines are probably less than the cost of the car in many use cases.
- kayodelycaon 3y agoThose laws are for sending things unsolicited. In this case, the customer asked for the car and agreed to pay for it. The company failed to process the payment. Very different scenario.
- maximinus_thrax 3y ago> There are laws around sending people packages and then demanding payment. Laws are different when you request the package. I don't believe Fisker sent cars to random people.
- darth_avocado 3y agoUltimately it boils down to the purchase agreement. Usually the company still has a right to collect payment and in a legal setting, the company will still win because the purchase agreement holds the buyer accountable for payment unless there is a clause in there which dictates the terms of late payment.
- Atotalnoob 3y agoThey might have a case to keep the car! There are laws around sending people packages and then demanding payment. I think it was to stop trolls from mailing you garbage and demanding payment afterwards… I’m not a lawyer, them having a purchase agreement in place probably changes things, but a clever lawyer might be able to make a case, but I’m just spitballing
- miohtama 3y ago“Checks were not cashed in a timely manner or just lost altogether” only in the US of A, or movies from 70s, something like this.
- petercooper 3y agoTo be fair, my mother is in a protracted situation with one of Europe's largest banks and the UK government's savings scheme. She made a transfer of a sum of money to the savings scheme but the bank refused for various reasons, yet the savings scheme acted as if they had received it. She now has the lump sum in both the bank account and the savings scheme with both of them claiming everything is fine and refusing to investigate further unless she files an official complaint at having 2x the money(!) If a global bank and the UK government can't figure this stuff out, I can certainly see how a company like Fisker might drop the ball.
- mvdtnz 3y agoOP was commenting on the use of cheques, which is comical in the rest of the world. Banking errors can happen anywhere.
- bigiain 3y agoYep. I remember having a chequebook. Pretty sure it was around the mid 1990s. I don't remember ever using one, or ever renewing the chequebook. I don't think I've seen an actual paper cheque since the job I quit in 1998. (I'm from Australia.)
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoGuess she should close the savings account and see how much they send her?
- throwway120385 3y ago"Bank error in your favor. Collect $200."
- neilv 3y agoCould the accounting problems be due to intentionally delaying having accurate revenue numbers? Or (looking at vehicles delivered without payment) sales dept. breaking rules? Or (always a good guess) is it actually a software fiasco, and people trying to work around non-working software? Or did they not have an adequate accounting organization set up when they started taking orders, and for some reason let that persist for months?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- peter_l_downs 3y agoYes, to every single one of your questions.
- gangstead 3y agoThey've also slashed prices https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-27/fisker-slashes-ev-prices-as-much-as-39-in-fight-for-survival https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-27/fisker-sl... . Presumably that's on existing inventory as the manufacturing is paused. So even if they do cash your check it won't be as big as it used to be. It looks like bankruptcy is imminent. If they do go under does that mean there would be no one there to collect the telemetry? Would an electric car made by a bankrupt company be the first electric car not to constantly be spying on its owners?
- leptons 3y agoSomeone else could still do the spying.
- londons_explore 3y agoMore importantly, electric cars use a TLS protocol for charging, and that TLS protocol requires the manufacturers to issue new certificates every (90?) days. If the servers go down, these cars won't be able to charge with DC chargers at all (which requires the TLS protocol), and maybe not with home chargers either (which sometimes uses the TLS protocol).
- pornel 3y agoAre you sure about this? I thought client certs were only for plug'n'charge (which identifies individual cars for the purpose of payment), and charging paid out of band could be negotiated using dumber protocols.
- jmholla 3y agoThe 90 days limit is a Let's Encrypt limit. I don't think TLS limits that length in and of itself. Except that it might need to be finite. But I'm not sure that the `Not After` field is required.
- bigiain 3y agoFor maybe 5 years or so, the maximum expiry time for a TLS cert (for anything under the purview of the Certification Authority Browser Forum) has been just under 400 days. That's also not a hard technical limit in the TLS spec, you can easily generate a self signed cert that expires in the year 3000 if you want, but it's voluntarily abided by from all the Certificate Authorities that want to have their root certs included in almost every web browser. It's _possible_ that EV chargers don't use common Certificate Authorities, but it feels unlikely to me.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoRelated: Fisker Trading Suspended by NYSE https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39821335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39821335
- chasers 3y agoRivian lost my full payment for an R1S.
- gangstead 3y agoWhat was the outcome? Free car? A strongly worded letter and you wrote another check?
- chasers 3y agoNot a free car because I paid them. Funny enough their dashboard showed a payment so I just screenshot that for them to look up in their own db!
- peter_l_downs 3y agoThat's astonishing. What ended up happening?
- thih9 3y agoRecent discussion about Fisker in the context of a popular negative review of their car (“the worst car I've ever reviewed”): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39650115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39650115
- reilly3000 3y ago“Material Weakness” is audit-speak for royal f-up. As a public company I’m amazed they were able to make it through prior financial statements without proper controls. If their quality control related suits don’t take them down the investor ones sure could.
- peterldowns 3y agoBilling and Accounts Payable will always seem like a "how could you mess that up?" problem to engineers, but it literally is difficult and complicated and rife with ways to very seriously and permanently fuck your relationship with your customer. And potentially with your auditors, investors, and whoever performs legal oversight in your jurisdiction. All of the largest companies in the tech world have been hit by AP fraud. Billing, collecting taxes, etc. is just fundamentally complicated (fundamentally = by laws of the lands.) There's a reason Stripe is a bazillion dollar business! That said, this screams of amateur hour. If Fisker can't keep track of the money I certainly wouldn't trust them to build a car correctly. EDIT: I didn't realize they were already a public company. How in the fuck did they pull that off? It's so over for them.
- jerlam 3y agoFisker became a public company through a SPAC, which allows them to conveniently sidestep a lot of procedures than an IPO would entail.
- peter_l_downs 3y agoAhhhhhh of course. Thanks, that makes sense.
- nickjj 3y ago> Billing and Accounts Payable will always seem like a "how could you mess that up?" problem to engineers, but it literally is difficult and complicated and rife with ways to very seriously and permanently fuck your relationship with your customer Yep. Over the years I've seen some pretty crazy payment related errors that you can't think is possible, like a 12+ year old publicly traded company who generates $60 million dollars a year and their business model is a platform that lets other people sell products, in other words their customers have their own customers and buying things with money through a hosted checkout page is a focal point of their business. One bug was during this checkout flow: - Open checkout page for product A and see a buy price of $99 - Open a new tab and visit product B's checkout page and see a buy price of $199 - Switch back to the first tab and buy product A for $99 - You get charged $199 and credited for purchasing product B I was only the end user of such a system so I don't know what their code looked like but I'm guessing their checkout page had stuff stored in a session and the last page loaded new data in the session but it didn't match what was shown on the checkout page. That's a massive assumption but that's how I imagine it happened.
- buildsjets 3y agoThere is an old Saturday Night Live commercial skit for a fake financial services company, produced in the style of the old Charles Schwab ads. It seems like they could have used some advice from David Schwimmer: We will make a list of our clients, and how much money each of them has given us to invest. We will keep this list in a safe place. If we have time, we will make a copy of the list, in case something happens to the first list. We must take special care of the list with each client’s name and the amount of money he has invested. If we were to lose that list, we would be ruined. If my wife calls while I’m in shagging my secretary, tell her I’m at a board meeting. That way I’ll be able to continue shagging my secretary without my wife knowing about it. If my wife were to find out about me and my secretary, that would be bad. As bad as losing the list. https://snltranscripts.jt.org/95/95cgrayson1.phtml https://snltranscripts.jt.org/95/95cgrayson1.phtml https://snltranscripts.jt.org/95/95cgrayson2.phtml https://snltranscripts.jt.org/95/95cgrayson2.phtml
- pbj1968 3y agoMy neighbor has one. Beautiful car. Parts are unobtanium. It’s sat on his driveway for five years.