5 ms·

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

178 points by breve 5mo ago

tadfisher 5mo ago
So a leasing company bought the source code for $2.5 million and then cut off owners after they refused an additional deal. What was the point, then? Is there anything rational about this market interaction?
- fooker 5mo ago
  Patent trolling
- justinclift 5mo ago
  Leasing company probably thought they'd found some suckers to pay their (the leasing company's) cloud bills.
- aleksejs 5mo ago
  The leasing company leases these cars to Uber drivers in NYC, who presumably did not get cut off.
  - qdotme 5mo ago
    That explains the over-representation of Oceans in NYC’s supercharging network, and one of the worst side-effects of opening that network to non-Tesla operators. Overall I think it’s a good thing, but it’s the closest to Eternal September I ever experienced in my life, the sudden change inclusion of cultural strangers in a shared space with its customs etc.
cosmotic 5mo ago
Oh, not the owners of the company, the owners of the cars the company made.
- frantathefranta 5mo ago
  Yeah the headline made me think "oh god they are trying to get away with their scam for the third time".
purpleidea 5mo ago
I'd buy any Tesla, even the big truck, if it came with open source software! I don't want a car that's spyware like a phone. Let me be in control of it, let me mod it, let me own it. Who's going to sell me one?
- Hnrobert42 5mo ago
  Not exactly what you are asking for, but did you see that Rivian recently provided a way for owners to disable the vehicle's LTE connection? It's straight In Canada. In the US, you have to ask a dealer.
- pabs3 5mo ago
  Tesla is full of open source software, including the Linux kernel. They probably are GPL violators though. https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2018/may/18/tesla-incomplete-ccs/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2018/may/18/tesla-incomplete-... https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2019/oct/30/calling-all-tesla-owners/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2019/oct/30/calling-all-tesla... https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/dec/21/tesla-no-source-code-no-safety/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/dec/21/tesla-no-source-c... See also this interesting slide deck about the GPLv3 and cars, I expect that regulations would mean you could not drive cars with modified software (similar to what happens with solar inverters): https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Safely-Copylefted-Cars-Reexamining-GPLv3-Installation-Information-Requirements-ALS-Bradley-Kuhn-Behan-Webster-1.pdf https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
  - dmix 5mo ago
    > I expect that regulations would mean you could not drive cars with modified software Aggressive regulations for emissions control software + industry deterrence for car modifications via insurance and warranties
    - bestham 5mo ago
      Good then that there is very little need for emissions control in EV. No barrier for giving the owner of the vehicle more access to its innards.
MostlyStable 5mo ago
Fisker may have been especially vulnerable to this (my understanding from some very brief searching is that core vehicle functionality required cloud check ins without fallback), but nothing about this is inherent to EVs (this is response to Weisenthal's tweet early in the article). An ICE vehicle could (and many manufacturers are increasingly pushing in this direction) have the exact same problems. This is a much bigger problem that requires a bigger solution. I'm pretty intrigued by the mention at the end that several european manufacturers are collaborating on an opensource automotive software platform, although their track record on software isn't that encouraging.
- pstuart 5mo ago
  That so much could be done in an open source context is encouraging -- if Fisker could have made that a core of the offering maybe that could have made it more viable? They can still sell hardware, parts, services and support but owners would have DIY options too. Everybody wins.
nubg 5mo ago
> No more over-the-air updates. No more connected services. No more warranty. LLM slop. Why does the author believe he is entitled to our attention if he cannot even bother to use his own words?
- dylan604 5mo ago
  Well now I'm nervous I'm going to be susceptible to AI slop as that's a set of sentences I would absolutely have written my self. That kind of cadence is something that I remember being taught especially since it's comes as a group of three.
  - ksenzee 5mo ago
    There's a reason AI uses things like em dashes and parallel structure and groups of three (catch me doing it here too). It's good writing. (Also varied sentence length.) AI trained on good writing uses the outward structure of good writing.
Trufa 5mo ago
How involved is the software in the car, any while driving features? I'd be a little bit afraid of getting in that car even with the best efforts of the community, maybe it's not really for driving, i'd be even more nervous to get in a car with no updates, but still.
- jazzyjackson 5mo ago
  More than anything I am nervous about having a car running priority code that can have mandatory updates pushed at any time that change the cars behavior -- not just throttle response and adjusting the emissions here, they could be updating thresholds for when the auto-pilot cancels and return to manual control, what level of cruise the car defaults to (GM BlueCruise IMO is terrible about this, it cancels hands free mode often, without any auditory alert) and so on. Give me a car without internet uplink any day!
  - dylan604 5mo ago
    That's my issue. You could drive the car one day, go to bed, and the next day the car does not perform the same way it did yesterday. That's ridiculous. Any update needs to be approved by the user. Even if that means doing like Apple does where the user has to enter their password to approve the update scheduled for the middle of the night.
- KennyBlanken 5mo ago
  I remember watching a youtube video where the one guy who has become The Fisker Whisperer said that screwing up an update will total the vehicle because several of the control modules just can't be had anywhere, at least until another ends up in a junkyard. There is literally nothing about any Fisker automobile that makes it worth all this effort. But a handful of rich boomer tech execs think there's nothing else in the world that could possibly meet their expectations for a hybrid or electric vehicle, have more wealth than they know what to do with, and so here we are. Saabs are much the same way. Some nonsense about a completely overengineered security system in the newer vehicles that makes losing a key a "well, now you're fucked" event, I believe?
- 5mo ago
oldspleen 5mo ago
[dead]
forgetfreeman 5mo ago
"We need more open source in the auto industry" Uh no, we need significantly less software in the auto industry. Software sucks. It excels at taking relatively simple (if inconvenient) problems and in exchange for some notional convenience introduces problem spaces so baroque they border on the occult. An example: between all of the seat controls on the driver's seat of my wife's car I've counted 16 individual switch positions and something like six motors, all wired into the CAN bus so the central console can save user preferences. Without bothering to check the OEM parts cost to replace that seat I am absolutely dead ass certain that it by itself costs more than my first three cars combined. And all of this pageantry replaces the two traditional dumb mechanical levers to control seat distance from the pedals and back tilt. This and real-time cell network surveillance is all the proof I need that executive depravity in the auto industry is functionally unlimited, and the reason why I wouldn't accept a "modern" car as a gift, much less buy one.
kaonwarb 5mo ago
This reads very AI. Pangram [0] agrees [1]. [0] Not perfect, but I think as good evidence as any: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15654 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15654 [1] https://www.pangram.com/history/44cd07d3-ba94-4331-8c7f-a62650fa2c86?ucc=xSvilezo4sT https://www.pangram.com/history/44cd07d3-ba94-4331-8c7f-a626...
- kristopolous 5mo ago
  sure, but there's still actual journalism behind it. Isn't the primary objection to ai slop is that it's just vapid regurgitation? I've been reading electrek for years, they're generally pretty decent journalists. If the author here is doing the interview, getting the notes together, doing the research and then has a system prompt of the voice of the publication and says "generate", do we still say slop? Personally I think "eh..." - I think basically everyone will eventually view journalism as not necessarily involving the writing of the final document in the same way that most people don't yell about synthesizers not being real music any more.
  - bonsai_spool 5mo ago
    > most people don't yell about synthesizers not being real music any more. I think a lot more effort is required to release (popular) music, and I'm only hearing 'independent' music at concert venues which also require a lot of effort. It doesn't take a lot of effort to transform the raw materials of journalism, which you cite, into a finished product outside the process of writing and sitting with your thoughts. And there isn't a similar venue to the idea of concerts where I can personally see journalists' skill/creativity/mastery. Thus, I can't tell if the work of an AI-assisted journalist is intentional or complete the way I can tell if an AI song is poorly done.
    - embedding-shape 5mo ago
      If you cannot tell if the work is poorly done or not, why it matters if it's AI or not? The reason many of us dislike AI slop is because it's very evidently AI slop, if you cannot tell, then I wouldn't even say it's AI slop, maybe AI assisted if anything, but matters less if the content itself actually doesn't suck.
rafram 5mo ago
> 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. It’s sad to see a good site put out bad AI writing like this.
- foobarbecue 5mo ago
  "the irony reads" isn't even grammatically correct.
  - tim333 5mo ago
    I think it's human - coherent ideas, grammar errors. AI tends to do correct grammar, muddled ideas.
    - rafram 5mo ago
      I would guess it’s an AI foundation with some human tweaks that introduced errors.
  - BoorishBears 5mo ago
    I think what they're going for is > The irony of that headline... > [reflective pause] > "Coming soon, in a future software update" [shorter pause] now reads like an epitaph
  - Barbing 5mo ago
    Should be OK (besides the lack of irony!). Easier for me to show with another noun, comedy: "You HAVE to buy her novel ASAP! Sure, the comedy reads a bit acerbically at first, but chapter two through to the end is literary perfection."
    - tmtvl 5mo ago
      Or alternatively, with another verb: 'the irony seems to have gone unnoticed'.
xbmcuser 5mo ago
Car owners the current title changes the meaning
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
fsckboy 5mo ago
>Fisker had built what Cory Doctorow, the digital rights author and activist, pointedly called a “software-based car.” Virtually every subsystem in the Ocean — brakes, airbags, shifting, battery management, door locks — needed to periodically connect with Fisker’s cloud servers for diagnostics or regular operations. pretty sure you can say "Fisker built a software-based car" without being "pointed" and without needing to cite Cory Doctorow. It would be a pretty anodyne statement in an article about owners taking over maintenance of the software that is pervasaive in their electric cars from a defuct manufacturer, suggestion to the maintainers: please find some place in the UI to allow "Fiskers cut and paste" https://www.fiskars.com/-/media/fiskars/images/united-states/crafting/crafting-products-subcategories/scissors-and-shears/fiskars-scissors.jpg https://www.fiskars.com/-/media/fiskars/images/united-states...
TwoNineFive 5mo ago
WHERE DO I BUY ONE? This is not a joke. The prime thing that keeps me driving my old vehicle is my avoidance of modern corporate totalitarianism in tracked vehicles, spying, and other crap. I'm not buying something just to rent it too. I would pay above-market. I'm researching this right now. Maybe I've finally found my new car.
- overfeed 5mo ago
  There are dealerships out of California selling new and used stock. Edit: changed to present tense. Searching Google shopping for the model shows the locations and prices.
alex_young 5mo ago
This is the second time Fisker has burned car owners and gone out of business. How many more times will it happen? Shouldn’t stuff be allowed to die?
- ffsm8 5mo ago
  Owners of the cars, not the company. It's in the first few paragraphs - just hard to get there (without instantly closing) because it's pure AI slop...
pkphilip 5mo ago
I wish there was a similar attempt at making "open source" motorcycles
specialist 5mo ago
Minimally: All software should be placed in escrow, made available at end of support.
pimlottc 5mo ago
Oh phew, the scissors are safe, thought this was about Fiskars for a moment

178 points by breve 5mo ago

So a leasing company bought the source code for $2.5 million and then cut off owners after they refused an additional deal. What was the point, then? Is there anything rational about this market interaction?

fooker 5mo ago
Patent trolling
justinclift 5mo ago
Leasing company probably thought they'd found some suckers to pay their (the leasing company's) cloud bills.
aleksejs 5mo ago
The leasing company leases these cars to Uber drivers in NYC, who presumably did not get cut off.
- qdotme 5mo ago
  That explains the over-representation of Oceans in NYC’s supercharging network, and one of the worst side-effects of opening that network to non-Tesla operators. Overall I think it’s a good thing, but it’s the closest to Eternal September I ever experienced in my life, the sudden change inclusion of cultural strangers in a shared space with its customs etc.

cosmotic 5mo ago

Oh, not the owners of the company, the owners of the cars the company made.

frantathefranta 5mo ago
Yeah the headline made me think "oh god they are trying to get away with their scam for the third time".

purpleidea 5mo ago

I'd buy any Tesla, even the big truck, if it came with open source software! I don't want a car that's spyware like a phone. Let me be in control of it, let me mod it, let me own it. Who's going to sell me one?

Hnrobert42 5mo ago
Not exactly what you are asking for, but did you see that Rivian recently provided a way for owners to disable the vehicle's LTE connection? It's straight In Canada. In the US, you have to ask a dealer.
pabs3 5mo ago
Tesla is full of open source software, including the Linux kernel. They probably are GPL violators though. https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2018/may/18/tesla-incomplete-ccs/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2018/may/18/tesla-incomplete-... https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2019/oct/30/calling-all-tesla-owners/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2019/oct/30/calling-all-tesla... https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/dec/21/tesla-no-source-code-no-safety/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/dec/21/tesla-no-source-c... See also this interesting slide deck about the GPLv3 and cars, I expect that regulations would mean you could not drive cars with modified software (similar to what happens with solar inverters): https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Safely-Copylefted-Cars-Reexamining-GPLv3-Installation-Information-Requirements-ALS-Bradley-Kuhn-Behan-Webster-1.pdf https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
- dmix 5mo ago
  > I expect that regulations would mean you could not drive cars with modified software Aggressive regulations for emissions control software + industry deterrence for car modifications via insurance and warranties
  - bestham 5mo ago
    Good then that there is very little need for emissions control in EV. No barrier for giving the owner of the vehicle more access to its innards.

MostlyStable 5mo ago

Fisker may have been especially vulnerable to this (my understanding from some very brief searching is that core vehicle functionality required cloud check ins without fallback), but nothing about this is inherent to EVs (this is response to Weisenthal's tweet early in the article). An ICE vehicle could (and many manufacturers are increasingly pushing in this direction) have the exact same problems. This is a much bigger problem that requires a bigger solution. I'm pretty intrigued by the mention at the end that several european manufacturers are collaborating on an opensource automotive software platform, although their track record on software isn't that encouraging.

pstuart 5mo ago
That so much could be done in an open source context is encouraging -- if Fisker could have made that a core of the offering maybe that could have made it more viable? They can still sell hardware, parts, services and support but owners would have DIY options too. Everybody wins.

nubg 5mo ago

> No more over-the-air updates. No more connected services. No more warranty. LLM slop. Why does the author believe he is entitled to our attention if he cannot even bother to use his own words?

dylan604 5mo ago
Well now I'm nervous I'm going to be susceptible to AI slop as that's a set of sentences I would absolutely have written my self. That kind of cadence is something that I remember being taught especially since it's comes as a group of three.
- ksenzee 5mo ago
  There's a reason AI uses things like em dashes and parallel structure and groups of three (catch me doing it here too). It's good writing. (Also varied sentence length.) AI trained on good writing uses the outward structure of good writing.

Trufa 5mo ago

How involved is the software in the car, any while driving features? I'd be a little bit afraid of getting in that car even with the best efforts of the community, maybe it's not really for driving, i'd be even more nervous to get in a car with no updates, but still.

jazzyjackson 5mo ago
More than anything I am nervous about having a car running priority code that can have mandatory updates pushed at any time that change the cars behavior -- not just throttle response and adjusting the emissions here, they could be updating thresholds for when the auto-pilot cancels and return to manual control, what level of cruise the car defaults to (GM BlueCruise IMO is terrible about this, it cancels hands free mode often, without any auditory alert) and so on. Give me a car without internet uplink any day!
- dylan604 5mo ago
  That's my issue. You could drive the car one day, go to bed, and the next day the car does not perform the same way it did yesterday. That's ridiculous. Any update needs to be approved by the user. Even if that means doing like Apple does where the user has to enter their password to approve the update scheduled for the middle of the night.
KennyBlanken 5mo ago
I remember watching a youtube video where the one guy who has become The Fisker Whisperer said that screwing up an update will total the vehicle because several of the control modules just can't be had anywhere, at least until another ends up in a junkyard. There is literally nothing about any Fisker automobile that makes it worth all this effort. But a handful of rich boomer tech execs think there's nothing else in the world that could possibly meet their expectations for a hybrid or electric vehicle, have more wealth than they know what to do with, and so here we are. Saabs are much the same way. Some nonsense about a completely overengineered security system in the newer vehicles that makes losing a key a "well, now you're fucked" event, I believe?
5mo ago

oldspleen 5mo ago

[dead]

forgetfreeman 5mo ago

"We need more open source in the auto industry" Uh no, we need significantly less software in the auto industry. Software sucks. It excels at taking relatively simple (if inconvenient) problems and in exchange for some notional convenience introduces problem spaces so baroque they border on the occult. An example: between all of the seat controls on the driver's seat of my wife's car I've counted 16 individual switch positions and something like six motors, all wired into the CAN bus so the central console can save user preferences. Without bothering to check the OEM parts cost to replace that seat I am absolutely dead ass certain that it by itself costs more than my first three cars combined. And all of this pageantry replaces the two traditional dumb mechanical levers to control seat distance from the pedals and back tilt. This and real-time cell network surveillance is all the proof I need that executive depravity in the auto industry is functionally unlimited, and the reason why I wouldn't accept a "modern" car as a gift, much less buy one.

kaonwarb 5mo ago

This reads very AI. Pangram [0] agrees [1]. [0] Not perfect, but I think as good evidence as any: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15654 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15654 [1] https://www.pangram.com/history/44cd07d3-ba94-4331-8c7f-a62650fa2c86?ucc=xSvilezo4sT https://www.pangram.com/history/44cd07d3-ba94-4331-8c7f-a626...

kristopolous 5mo ago
sure, but there's still actual journalism behind it. Isn't the primary objection to ai slop is that it's just vapid regurgitation? I've been reading electrek for years, they're generally pretty decent journalists. If the author here is doing the interview, getting the notes together, doing the research and then has a system prompt of the voice of the publication and says "generate", do we still say slop? Personally I think "eh..." - I think basically everyone will eventually view journalism as not necessarily involving the writing of the final document in the same way that most people don't yell about synthesizers not being real music any more.
- bonsai_spool 5mo ago
  > most people don't yell about synthesizers not being real music any more. I think a lot more effort is required to release (popular) music, and I'm only hearing 'independent' music at concert venues which also require a lot of effort. It doesn't take a lot of effort to transform the raw materials of journalism, which you cite, into a finished product outside the process of writing and sitting with your thoughts. And there isn't a similar venue to the idea of concerts where I can personally see journalists' skill/creativity/mastery. Thus, I can't tell if the work of an AI-assisted journalist is intentional or complete the way I can tell if an AI song is poorly done.
  - embedding-shape 5mo ago
    If you cannot tell if the work is poorly done or not, why it matters if it's AI or not? The reason many of us dislike AI slop is because it's very evidently AI slop, if you cannot tell, then I wouldn't even say it's AI slop, maybe AI assisted if anything, but matters less if the content itself actually doesn't suck.

rafram 5mo ago

> 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. It’s sad to see a good site put out bad AI writing like this.

foobarbecue 5mo ago
"the irony reads" isn't even grammatically correct.
- tim333 5mo ago
  I think it's human - coherent ideas, grammar errors. AI tends to do correct grammar, muddled ideas.
  - rafram 5mo ago
    I would guess it’s an AI foundation with some human tweaks that introduced errors.
- BoorishBears 5mo ago
  I think what they're going for is > The irony of that headline... > [reflective pause] > "Coming soon, in a future software update" [shorter pause] now reads like an epitaph
- Barbing 5mo ago
  Should be OK (besides the lack of irony!). Easier for me to show with another noun, comedy: "You HAVE to buy her novel ASAP! Sure, the comedy reads a bit acerbically at first, but chapter two through to the end is literary perfection."
  - tmtvl 5mo ago
    Or alternatively, with another verb: 'the irony seems to have gone unnoticed'.

xbmcuser 5mo ago

Car owners the current title changes the meaning

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

fsckboy 5mo ago

>Fisker had built what Cory Doctorow, the digital rights author and activist, pointedly called a “software-based car.” Virtually every subsystem in the Ocean — brakes, airbags, shifting, battery management, door locks — needed to periodically connect with Fisker’s cloud servers for diagnostics or regular operations. pretty sure you can say "Fisker built a software-based car" without being "pointed" and without needing to cite Cory Doctorow. It would be a pretty anodyne statement in an article about owners taking over maintenance of the software that is pervasaive in their electric cars from a defuct manufacturer, suggestion to the maintainers: please find some place in the UI to allow "Fiskers cut and paste" https://www.fiskars.com/-/media/fiskars/images/united-states/crafting/crafting-products-subcategories/scissors-and-shears/fiskars-scissors.jpg https://www.fiskars.com/-/media/fiskars/images/united-states...

TwoNineFive 5mo ago

WHERE DO I BUY ONE? This is not a joke. The prime thing that keeps me driving my old vehicle is my avoidance of modern corporate totalitarianism in tracked vehicles, spying, and other crap. I'm not buying something just to rent it too. I would pay above-market. I'm researching this right now. Maybe I've finally found my new car.

overfeed 5mo ago
There are dealerships out of California selling new and used stock. Edit: changed to present tense. Searching Google shopping for the model shows the locations and prices.

alex_young 5mo ago

This is the second time Fisker has burned car owners and gone out of business. How many more times will it happen? Shouldn’t stuff be allowed to die?

ffsm8 5mo ago
Owners of the cars, not the company. It's in the first few paragraphs - just hard to get there (without instantly closing) because it's pure AI slop...

pkphilip 5mo ago

I wish there was a similar attempt at making "open source" motorcycles

specialist 5mo ago

Minimally: All software should be placed in escrow, made available at end of support.

pimlottc 5mo ago

Oh phew, the scissors are safe, thought this was about Fiskars for a moment