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Article: The Righteous EV Owners Who Won’t Let Their Broken Cars Die

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In October 2024, a Norwegian man's Fisker Ocean electric car completely shut down and locked him inside during a storm, leaving him stranded. With the manufacturer bankrupt, he turned to an online owners' group, which connected him with a volunteer expert who guided a tow driver through the obscure process of manually opening the car.

This incident highlights the broader crisis faced by Fisker owners, who have been abandoned by the bankrupt company without support for software or parts. In response, the global Fisker Owners Association has transformed into a volunteer-run network, sourcing parts and sharing technical knowledge to keep their cars operational.

The group's efforts represent a grassroots rebellion against a tech and automotive economy where companies can abandon products and customers, forcing owners to take control of their own property's functionality and maintenance.

Main Topics: Electric vehicle failure and owner abandonment following manufacturer bankruptcy; grassroots, owner-led technical support networks; consumer rights and ownership in the modern tech-driven economy.

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https://www.wired.com/story/the-righteous-ev-owners-who-wont-let-their-broken-cars-die/

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2026-02-24 11:00

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2026-03-04 14:33

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2026-03-04 15:04

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On an October evening in 2024, a gardener named Svein Hodne was driving home from vacation on a wind-buffeted coastal road in southwest Norway when his electric car began behaving strangely. Yellow and red warnings lit up its display. An alarm went off. The car lost power. Hodne barely managed to turn off the road and into a bus stop, right next to a graveyard and a church, before the car came to a stop. He was alone.
His phone battery running low, Hodne quickly found a tow service online and called. He was told it would be about an hour wait. He went outside to stretch his legs, but it was dark, rainy, and in the mid-forties; he got back inside the car and closed the door behind him. Then everything went black. The car’s screens and lights turned off. The heater and fan died. Most disconcerting, he heard the car doors lock shut. The windows wouldn’t budge. As the glass started fogging up with condensation, he panicked.
“What if I run out of oxygen?” he remembered thinking. He worried, too, that the tow operator would have no clue how to free him from his bricked EV, a Mariana blue Fisker Ocean. Like any modern car, it was powered by proprietary software. But its maker, Fisker, had declared bankruptcy four months earlier, and he couldn’t find good information—or even a phone number—online. Who could he contact now?
Hodne went on Facebook and found a group called Fisker Owners Association. He posted: “I’m locked inside my car, waiting for rescue. Everything is black on the screens. Keys don’t work. Restart doesn’t work. NOTHING. Totally dead.” Though Hodne didn’t know it, he’d just set off a global chain reaction that rippled through a small but dedicated community of slightly peculiar electric vehicle fans.
In upstate New York, a group administrator saw the post. Since the Fisker bankruptcy, Cristian Fleming was doing everything he could to keep the Ocean on the road. (Never mind that his own Ocean had trouble getting up the steep dirt path to his home.) Fleming reached out to a close contact in Europe he thought would know someone who could help. That person sent Hodne a message: Call Jens Guthe in Norway, and included a number.
In his Oslo home office, Jens Guthe picked up the call from an unknown number. He'd previously had a 30-year banking career that took him all over the world. But Guthe’s last few months had been eaten by the Ocean, too, as he had spent hours helping desperate owners hunt down increasingly hard-to-find parts for their cars. Hodne had just enough phone battery to explain the situation and connect Guthe with the tow driver, who had by now arrived. Guthe explained not only how to spark the battery but also the precise movements needed to open the Ocean’s hood hinge, a technique, says Guthe, that seems built into only one other car, an Audi manufactured in the ’90s.
For weeks afterward, Ocean owners from around the world who had seen his post sent him messages: Had he made it out alright? Moved, Hodne spent the $600 yearly fee to join the Fisker Owners Association with Fleming, Guthe, and some 4,000 other Ocean owners.
What he found was less an amateur car club than a volunteer-run multinational automotive company in the making. As many owners saw it, Fisker had built a flawed vehicle and then abandoned them when they needed help. If the company wouldn’t be making good on years of software updates and replacement parts, then they would push the code and source the parts themselves. This was about more than an electric car, or a hobby, or even a community. It was about taking back control of an economy run by rent-seeking tech companies that will jack up prices until the day they drop you.
“I liked when I bought a car and I owned it,” says Fleming, who is now the FOA’s president. “Can this get interesting enough that people start going to these companies and saying, ‘Just fuck off. Fuck off’? I’ve seen a world where things are actually nice, and it is not this.”
For decades, consumer and tech advocates across the world have advocated for what's known as the “right to repair.” They have asked lawmakers that force companies to give customers the tools to fix the stuff they buy themselves. Now the debate had come for a $70,000 luxury vehicle. The Ocean situation “is a canary in the coal mine for an economy populated by ‘smart,’ software-driven, connected things,” says Paul Roberts, a security writer and right-to-repair activist. “How do we keep this from happening all over the place? How do we keep this from becoming an epidemic?”
Mulishly determined, borderline annoying, providentially skilled, relatively well-heeled, the FOA volunteers became soldiers for a tech liberation movement. They just might win.
Fisker fans can point to many elements of its design and performance as appealing, but, on a basic level—it’s pretty. Its designer, Henrik Fisker, worked at BMW, Ford, and Aston Martin before founding, over the course of a decade, two car companies that he named after himself. (The first, Fisker Automotive, which made a cult-classic plug-in hybrid called the Karma, also went bankrupt.) The sleek Ocean was a four-door SUV crossover that for some EV-curious buyers felt like a hardier and more spacious alternative to Tesla’s offerings. It had inventive and charming design turns: a California mode, which lowered every window in the car with a push of a button; a little pull-out tray in the center console that fit a few tacos. Zippy and smooth, it was also a joy to drive. The company contracted with well-respected Austrian manufacturer Magna Steyr to build the car, which gave some nervous buyers peace of mind.
But the Ocean, drivers and technicians told me later, showed signs of having been rushed to production. Soon after it went on sale in 2023, drivers began reporting issues. A brief and incredibly incomplete list: sticky exterior door handles failed to open; glitchy gearshifts looked parked, then allowed the car to roll away; key fobs stopped working; confused software constantly threw false alarms; software “updates” bricked cars, leaving owners with expensive, attractive sculptures; and 12-volt batteries that were usually responsible for powering up the vehicle or running its climate systems sometimes suddenly died, locking owners inside their cars. News headlines warned of trouble for the company legally responsible for fixing it all.
Owners started convening in online forums to discuss what they would do if the company went out of business. When Fisker officially filed for bankruptcy in June 2024, they mobilized, incorporating the Fisker Owners Association as a nonprofit and setting up an independent board. “We need to get organized if we have any chance of representing the owners’ interests,” José De Bardi, an early UK FOA member, told me at the time. He said he hadn’t slept in 10 days, since the bankruptcy announcement.
A few weeks later, in the summer of 2024, a New York bankruptcy lawyer named Daniel Shamah got a message from an acquaintance with a favor to ask: Would he mind meeting with a Fisker Ocean owner? Shamah had heard of Fisker, of course. The automaker’s bankruptcy filing had made waves across the legal community. Shamah thought the meeting would involve giving some unfortunate person a few words of advice on owning a lemon. He thought those words would go something like this, he recalled months later: “It sucks, but you guys are kind of stuck.” In a bankruptcy, whatever money is left over usually goes first to creditors like lenders. Ocean owners who wanted Fisker to pay to fix their cars would likely be left to fight others for scraps.
When Shamah signed onto the meeting, though, it wasn’t with one owner, but with three, and they spoke not just for themselves but also for a legally incorporated nonprofit. Product owners don’t usually get involved in manufacturers’ legal wranglings. “I had never encountered this in bankruptcy before,” Shamah says. Soon he was representing Fisker owners in a Delaware court and helped install Fleming as one of seven representatives on a committee tasked with consulting on and helping to create the automaker’s reorganization plan—a position, it seems, never before granted to a person simply representing a product’s owners.
The legal team’s objective was twofold: It wanted to make sure that Fisker, or whoever purchased its assets, would pay for US-based owners’ recall repairs. (Eventually, the US federal government would oversee six recalls related to the Ocean.) More ambitiously, it wanted to guarantee that owners’ cars would keep running by securing access to Ocean auto parts, the know-how needed to fix the cars, and the Fisker cloud.
That last bit was important because, like most modern cars, the Ocean depended on internet connectivity to run. The cloud enabled Ocean nice-to-haves, including the ability to remotely start and heat and cool the vehicle through Fisker’s (often buggy) app. More critically, the cloud allowed Oceans to receive over-the-air software updates, necessary because the cars’ software clearly had serious issues. Flawed software had already contributed to more than a hundred reports of sudden motor power loss and brake malfunctions, leading to at least two injuries, according to federal filings.
In spite of the Ocean’s lemon-flavored reputation, the Fisker Owners Association wasn’t the only party interested in the future of the vehicle. A New York City company called American Lease soon emerged as the most likely to license Fisker’s remaining US assets, including its IP. American Lease rented cars to Uber and Lyft drivers. It was interested in Fisker because the city had announced plans to electrify its for-hire car system by 2030; in the meantime, it would ratchet up the share of required no-emission cars each year, in effect limiting new ride-hail licenses to gas-free rides. The company wanted Fisker’s 3,300 unsold Oceans to rent to ride-hail drivers.
Like the association members, American Lease also wanted consistent access to Ocean parts and the company’s cloud to stay online, and it was willing to pay millions to make that happen. But how much did the company really care about the car’s existing owners? Quietly, the association’s leadership harbored more paranoid questions: If American Lease ended up basically owning Fisker, would it find ways to pump desperate Ocean owners for cash by charging them more and more for updates? For owners trying to break free from modern car ownership, it might be another trap. They worried that, instead of escaping Fisker's iron grip on their car's workings, American Lease might take its place. Leadership held close, too, another, bigger ambition: What if, they wondered, the group of owners could own the IP instead.
When anyone buys a car, the company that built it makes a promise: We will fix this when it breaks. This is true, literally, because all new cars are sold with manufacturers’ warranties. But it’s also a philosophical orientation, one that has existed from the beginning of automotive history.
“It does not please us to have the buyer’s car wear out or become obsolete,” wrote Henry Ford, the world’s first great automotive industrialist (with the writer Samuel Crowther), in 1922. “We want the man who buys one of our products never to have to buy another. We never make an improvement that renders any previous model obsolete. The parts of a specific model are not only interchangeable with all other cars of that model, but they are interchangeable with similar parts on all the cars that we have turned out.”
Car owners have taken the promise seriously. The Volkswagen Beetle was a cute car with a dynamite advertising campaign, but the 1960s saw it become a consumer darling partly because it was easy to repair and modify. (You can still buy the 1969 DIY manual How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive on Amazon.) In the 1970s, Japan’s Toyota began to dominate thanks to its simple, repeatable, and consistent mechanical designs, its conservative approach to the introduction of new technologies, and its clear and exhaustive manuals that helped technicians repair. Today, plenty of drivers’ purchasing decisions are driven, subtly, by repair issues. The mass-market cars that tend to retain their value over time are, not coincidentally, the autos that are manufactured reliably, with parts that are easy to replace.
“The sales pitch to Americans for buying a car was about autonomy,” says Leah Chan Grinvald, an intellectual property law scholar with the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “The idea was that it’s going to give you a taste of freedom. You can drive where you want to drive, and you can repair it.”
But as computerized systems made their way into more products, all sorts of manufacturers began to lock down their underlying software, requiring proprietary (and expensive) diagnostic tools to make changes or fix it. In 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act gave manufacturers a novel path to lock out consumers by making it illegal to circumvent certain restrictions on software.
The makers of printers were among the first to apply the new provision to their products by creating ink cartridge refills incompatible with other manufacturers’, then successfully litigating their right to do it in court. In 2009, Apple introduced a new five-pointed screw called the pentalobe to seal closed computers and phones. Consumer rights activists decried the move as an attempt to lock out unauthorized third-party repairers and owners who wanted to fiddle with their phones. By then, farmers had complained they were locked out of repairing their own tractors. McDonalds franchisees said they wanted to fix their frozen yogurt machines. Video game players hoped to customize their gaming systems.
The auto market’s maverick stance didn’t protect it against a turn toward software and the intellectual property lawyers who now defended it. Tesla led the game by starting its iterative design process with software first and promising that it would continuously update cars—and more quietly, fix bugs and make fixes ordered by federal recalls—through over-the-air software updates. Globally, automakers began to rejigger their vehicles’ entire system architectures to allow centralized computers to control nearly everything. The trend is especially striking in electric vehicles, which are often designed from the software up and contain some 3,000 semiconductors per vehicle, up to three times what’s seen in their gas-powered brethren.
Software also enabled a new potential revenue stream for manufacturers working against ever-thinning profit margins: subscriptions. In 2022, BMW’s Korean subsidiary provoked global outcry after it floated the idea of charging drivers monthly fees to use their seat warmers. Still, automakers expect to make billions in coming years from subscriptions and additional charges that give drivers access to advanced driver assistance, security, and maintenance features.
Despite all this change, autos have a robust aftermarket parts industry, full of rich and powerful corporate players. Auto repair is worth over $80 billion in the US alone, and some 70 percent of American auto parts and services are supplied not by automakers’ dealership networks but by independent suppliers and servicers.
Which has led some consumer advocates to see right-to-repair fights in the auto industry—and battles fought by groups like the Fisker Owners Association—as a tip of the spear. These advocates pushed for a ballot initiative in Massachusetts that passed in 2020, requiring automakers to share data with owners—and third-party repairers—through a standardized, open access system. Automakers sued, arguing that open access to vehicle data was a security risk. As the lawsuit worked its way through the courts, Kia and Subaru even disabled some of their tech systems in the state, arguing that they couldn’t comply with the law. Last year, a federal judge dismissed the companies’ case. But the open-access system still hasn’t been built. Meanwhile, automakers have argued that the majority of repairs already happen at independent repair shops. No other solutions, they say, are needed.
As Fisker’s bankruptcy proceedings dragged on in 2024, Ocean owners’ dark prognosis improved. For now, American Lease, the company poised to license Fisker’s intellectual property in the US, seemed happy enough to take Fisker Ocean owners along for the ride.
In the summer of that year, the association’s leaders were careful to establish a friendly relationship with the company that might control their cars’ fate. Fleming drove several times to meet with American Lease executive vice president Josh Bleiberg in the Bronx; at one point, Bleiberg had American Lease’s techs fix Fleming’s Ocean for free.
The two groups even began a loosely structured business partnership. Quickly realizing the limits of its nonprofit status, the association spun up a US-based parts company it named Tsunami Automotive and a European counterpart called Tidal Wave. Both were staffed by small, unpaid crews of volunteer tech and logistics experts and, unlike the nonprofit, could actually sign contracts to buy parts from auto suppliers and sell them, for a discounted price, to association members. American Lease and Tsunami even went in together on the shipment of car parts, sent from Fisker’s Austrian factory, and stored them side by side in a warehouse.
But finding more of those parts had become a serious problem. Across the world, Oceans were failing. As Svein Hodne would learn while trapped on a Norwegian highway, the vehicle’s hood took some finesse to open, but in two reported instances, vehicles’ bolts loosened unbidden, causing the hoods to fly up in the middle of trips and crack cars’ windshields. Thus, windshields were in demand. So were door handles, which sometimes didn’t open and also lacked a crucial final finish, leading to cracking and disintegration in the sun. (If you didn’t recognize an Ocean by its distinctive design, the door handles wrapped in tape might give it away.) Owners also desperately needed key fobs. Each had received just one oft-malfunctioning fob with their car. A Texas owner’s toddler threw his in a pool; an Oregon owner’s puppy used his as a chew toy; a Finnish driver lost his on a biking excursion and stranded himself in the mountains.
At first, Fisker’s disorganization was the group’s gain. The automaker had basically ghosted its parts suppliers and dealerships, who then heard through news reports about the FOA. Several reached out: We have this stuff lying around our warehouse, and Fisker isn’t paying its bill. Do you want it? A San Jose importer-exporter named Michael Rosito had been a founding member of the association and now signed on to be the chief operating officer of Tsunami. He coordinated with freight drivers and shippers to get parts otherwise collecting dust in warehouses in Austria, factories in France, and dealerships scattered all over the US into Tsunami’s three warehouses in California and New York. Several wealthy association owners, again, fronted the costs.
The European arm of the Fisker Owners Association made do in its own way. In Norway, now-retired banker Jens Guthe was able to locate a pallet of more than 200 water pumps just before it got sent back to China. This was fortunate, because the ones shipped with Oceans had a faulty epoxy coating on their circuit boards that would eventually leak, causing the vehicles’ temperature systems to break and some Oceans to stall out while driving. (The water pumps were the subject of a recall in the US.) Guthe thought that all 300-some Norwegian FOA members would eventually need new pumps. So he devised a very Scandinavian communitarian solution: a water pump lottery. Each member put $15 into the pot, which he used to buy the pumps. Owners received water pumps whenever theirs happened to die. It was only fair.
But even if the group could get its hands on the right parts, association members quickly realized there weren’t enough people to install them. They fretted that the liquidation of the auto manufacturer might also mean the liquidation of the know-how needed to keep the cars running around the world. Even before the bankruptcy filing, Ocean owners faced weeks-long waits as mostly mobile technicians traveled to their areas. One former Fisker technician based in northern Virginia told me he had been dispatched in early 2024 to fix a Fisker executive’s car in Michigan. The technician’s own Ocean died along the way, stranding him in the cold at 2 in the morning.
The key to breaking both these logjams—the parts and the technician issue—turned out to require the same thing: a touch of corporate espionage. FOA volunteers worked their own Fisker contacts and hunted down executives on LinkedIn to ask for help. Some obliged.
One contingent convinced Fisker itself to host a technician training at its Southern California headquarters in the middle of the bankruptcy. There was “a whole lot of coercion and arm twisting,” says Fleming. They made a list of 20-odd technicians with experience working on electric vehicles and asked them to attend for just the cost of travel. (Such training usually costs technicians thousands and is arranged months in advance.) Techs who traveled to the Fisker office park remember the vibes being a bit off. Employees knew their days were numbered. Oceans sat on lifts in various stages of assembly. The space where the techs trained was tidy, but papers scattered the floors of other offices. The training curriculum seemed hastily put together. “There wasn’t a lot of organization to anything,” one technician remembered.
Then someone, somewhere passed on a copy of an internal Fisker tool that let technicians remotely access any Ocean on the company’s network. Volunteer engineers could use the tool to, for example, unlock cars for owners with troublesome fobs. Meanwhile, a handful of tech-minded volunteers in California, Canada, and Austria began reverse engineering the vehicle and quickly discovered that a series of vital vehicle modules had been left unencrypted. They could burrow into the car. This was legally dicey, and they knew they had to be careful. Messing with the Ocean’s software might infringe on the company’s intellectual property. Figuring out how the car worked from scratch, though, would allow them to avoid altering the company’s proprietary software and potentially keep them in the legal clear.
The assists from within Fisker continued. Someone, somewhere received an Ocean “parts bible,” a detailed list of every auto part and auto supplier for the vehicle. Volunteers representing the association, Tsunami, and Tidal Wave began reaching out to specific automotive suppliers and placing orders for parts.
In Europe, Guthe heard a rumor that a Polish subsidiary of the French company that made Ocean windshields had ferreted a few away somewhere in Eastern Europe. Over one of the countless Zoom meetings the European contingent held on Fridays, an association member in Sweden volunteered his own Polish wife to call the factory directly. She tracked down the glass.
In San Jose, engineer Majd Srour, essentially working two full-time jobs as he tried to reverse engineer the Ocean, helped figured out how to fix a persistent issue with the software that booted up the car. But the only way the car would accept the modified software was via a very cheap sort of USB stick usually found as freebies on the conference circuit. Another person on Srour's engineering team taught a Danish volunteer how to move the software onto the particular sticks, and that volunteer set up a makeshift workshop in her home creating more copies to send to owners. “I kind of hoped this was just a car,” she told me. “Now it’s a project.”
It seemed that people with real auto experience were beginning to pay attention. One association leader got a message from Henrik Fisker himself: The Fisker founder wanted to know how to join the Fisker Owners Association.
In October 2024, the Fisker bankruptcy proceedings came to a close. American Lease would indeed buy nearly 3,300 Oceans for $46.25 million, about $14,000 per vehicle—a steep discount. What was left of Fisker would cover the costs associated with the recalls on Ocean parts and software. And at the last possible moment, the FOA and American Lease reached an informal agreement—representatives for both called it a “handshake on the courtroom steps”—that would maintain Ocean owners’ access to the cloud. FOA said it would pay a total $2.5 million, to be broken into $500,000 installments over the course of five years, for access to the Ocean’s code base, diagnostic codes for maintenance, and other intellectual property. The group also reportedly agreed to reimburse American Lease for some of its cloud fees with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The New York company, meanwhile, contracted with a tech firm called Indigo Technologies to keep improving the Ocean’s software. Owners would have access to those fixes for a lump-sum fee.
Almost immediately, the deal looked shaky. Indigo began pushing a big software update to Oceans around the world, but what was billed as a fix bricked some 10 percent of the Oceans that downloaded it, rendering them useless. The association said Indigo didn’t respond to complaints. Still, the group paid out its first installment of $500,000. Meanwhile, American Lease had the responsibility of performing the government-mandated Ocean recalls. But owners said the company wasn’t getting them done. Some went ahead and got the repairs completed themselves, then tried to send the bill to the firm. Crickets.
The spring of 2025 was the association’s “Big Bang period,” Fleming said at the time. It had a democratic voting structure, monthly meetings, and plans to improve Ocean software courtesy of the engineering volunteers. New members like Svein Hodne were paying the $600 to join. Still, other members weren’t happy. They complained online that the organization wasn’t responsive to owners’ wishes and that it didn’t do enough to earn members’ annual fees. The volunteer car company, in other words, wasn’t living up to the ambitious promise implicit to car companies: We’ll keep this car running. Hundreds of members dropped out to lean on Indigo’s software solution, opting to pay Indigo a monthly fee for internet connectivity instead of waiting on the FOA. Some original members began taking time away from the association. Fleming himself had just come back from a multi-month break after having what he described as a breakdown brought on by the pressures of running the association.
The bank associated with Fisker finally began to process owners’ buy-back claims, and many wanted out. Fleming took advantage of the deal and traded in his Ocean for a new electric car from the startup Rivian—then turned around and bought another deeply discounted Ocean from a neighbor. “It’s a cold, unfriendly world out there right now,” he said, to explain why he wouldn’t quit this terrible car. “We’re having an adventure with a bunch of people.”
In April 2025, the situation got colder. Bleiberg, the American Lease executive, reportedly told the association members that American Lease had spent more than $800,000 keeping their Oceans connected to the cloud. He wanted them to chip in. The association refused to pay American Lease unless it sent a more formalized itemization of its charges. So American Lease cut the private owners, those not subscribed to its own, Indigo-led service, off from the cloud. Owners started up their cars to find they no longer had navigation or music. “We’ve got nothing,” an Ocean owner said as he filmed himself booting up his car’s infotainment system.
Months later, I found myself in a parking lot north of San Diego for a special meetup. Some 1,000 Fisker Oceans owned by American Lease were now picking up passengers around New York, but in San Diego, I had never seen so many—17 in all—gathered in one place. Some owners said this was their passion project; others just wanted to not lose the money they had invested into the car. “Is this the Fisker owners’ therapy session?” one owner shouted as he emerged from his bright blue Ocean. “Can you tell I own this car from the trail of tears on my face?”
“When I drove home from the meetup, I was welling up with tears,” one Pittsburgh attendee remembered. Did he regret buying his Ocean? Kind of. “I’m not unhappy that I’ve done it, but I’m not pleased,” he said. “The thing that’s instilled happiness is what happened with the FOA.”
The Fisker Owners Association had been busy. Members had built their own app for the Ocean and had plans to build and sell a device that would, in a roundabout way, give private Oceans their connectivity back. Now they were installing a software update that solved a long-standing Ocean headache: that the Fisker app no longer worked with the car. The group's new app update allowed for smoother connections and also made the cars’ notorious key fobs more reliable. The problem was that the change had to be made by hand, in person, so the group had organized more than 100 meetups around the world: in Indiana, Ohio, Maine, and Maryland, as well as Ontario, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Someone in Copenhagen baked a cake with a cartoon Henrik Fisker on top. A US volunteer remotely walked Iraq’s only FOA member through his own installation.
The FOA still isn't in contact with American Lease, which mostly suits executive Josh Bleiberg just fine. “There is a commercially available insured and professional service option out there for people, should they choose to take it,” he says, referring to the software and connectivity solution provided by his contracted vendor, Indigo, which now costs $500 a year. “If owners want to go through the hackathon, they’re going to do that.” Legal issues loom: Bleiberg says American Lease is preparing to sue the FOA for breach of contract.
A few weeks after the meetups concluded, the association made an announcement: It had found a bug in its key-fob software. Volunteers would have to make the installations again.
Today, despite all the troubles, some people are even picking up used Oceans because they’re excited about being part of the club. “It’s like absolutely the best hobby I can ever ask for,” a new owner told me. (It took his wife a bit of convincing to allow him to buy it, he admitted.)
“I want it to be my last car,” an FOA volunteer told me. “I will drive it until it has no battery left.”
That volunteer might get the chance. The FOA is still pushing for its own right to a Fisker Ocean IP license, which could give its crew access to the car’s code and the ability to fix and even build on its software, distributing tools that would allow a wider pool of technicians to work on the car.
Meanwhile, the broader right-to-repair issues aren’t resolved. Just this year, at least 33 bills that would require manufacturers to make parts and repair instructions available to consumers have been proposed in statehouses across the US. FOA members are seeing echoes of their situation everywhere. Michael Rosito, Tsunami’s logistics expert, got an email this fall from Google subsidiary Nest stating that the company would no longer support the software to control his smart thermostat, which he bought nine years ago. He’ll no longer be able to use an app—the system’s selling point—to control the temperature in his house. “This can’t be allowed to continue,” he says. “Who’s to say they’re not going to do this again?”
If the FOA is able to win the right to Fisker’s intellectual property, the deal would likely be unprecedented. Fan communities—mostly video game enthusiasts—have seized the means of production before by taking over software production after its makers abandoned it. (See: the Sega Dreamcast.) Vehicle IP has changed hands. (See: the DeLorean.) But car owners have not yet managed to wrangle, en masse, the right to keep building.
“I feel good about it,” Cristian Fleming told me, in his understated way. “Every day is an adventure.”
Update: 2/26/2026, 5:15 PM EDT: WIRED corrected the name spelling of José De Bardi.
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