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Fisker

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

Fred Lambert | May 16 2026 - 10:21 am PT

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When Fisker Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2024, it left roughly 11,000 Ocean SUV owners holding the keys to vehicles that cost them anywhere from $40,000 to $70,000 — and that were rapidly losing the software brains that made them work. No more over-the-air updates. No more connected services. No more warranty. The manufacturer was dead.

What happened next is one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the electric vehicle industry. Instead of accepting that their cars would become rolling paperweights, Fisker Ocean owners organized, reverse-engineered their vehicles’ proprietary software, hacked into CAN bus networks, built open-source tools on GitHub, and effectively stood up a volunteer-run open-sourced car company from the ashes of Fisker.

From $70,000 SUVs to orphans overnight

The speed of Fisker’s collapse was staggering. The company, once touted as a Tesla rival that had secured over 31,000 Ocean reservations totaling $1.7 billion in potential revenue, produced just 11,000 vehicles before the money ran out. Bankruptcy filings revealed more than $1 billion in debts.

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.<br>Advertisement - scroll for more content

The core problem was architectural. 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. When those servers went dark, the cars didn’t just lose their infotainment screens. They lost critical functionality.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin captured the mood on X in July 2024, writing: "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."

He was right. But what neither Buterin nor Doctorow could have predicted was what the owners would do about it.

4,000 strangers build a car company

Within months of the bankruptcy filing, thousands of Ocean owners formed the Fisker Owners Association (FOA) — a nonprofit that quickly grew to 4,000 members and began operating as something between a car club, a tech startup, and an independent automaker.

The FOA hired independent tech experts who began reverse-engineering Fisker’s proprietary software patches. Members taught each other how to flash firmware. They organized bulk purchases of replacement parts — negotiating the price of key fobs down from roughly $1,000 each to a fraction of that through coordinated group buys. They hosted free global key fob pairing events, saving each owner $100 to $250.

In Europe, they created what they call the "Flying Doctors" program — a mobile repair network where technically skilled members travel to help other owners keep their vehicles running. In the U.S., the FOA pushed to ensure that safety recalls were included in the bankruptcy proceedings, secured parts supply channels through companies like Tsunami/Tidal Wave, and convinced several insurers to maintain coverage for a vehicle whose manufacturer no longer existed.

As Auto Connected Car News reported in September 2025, the FOA had accomplished something remarkable in just six months: court representation for recalls, new parts pipelines, insurance preservation, and the beginnings of an independent software support ecosystem.

In other words, they were doing the work that Fisker left undone.

The open-source arsenal

The technical work happening beneath the surface is where this story gets truly fascinating. What started as desperate troubleshooting has evolved into a genuine open-source ecosystem around the Fisker Ocean.

On GitHub, a developer named MichaelOE reverse-engineered the API behind Fisker’s official "My Fisker" mobile app and built a Home Assistant integration that exposes every cloud API value as a sensor — with all the app’s buttons available as Home Assistant controls. The project has 135 commits, 20 releases, and is licensed under Apache 2.0. It’s a small but functioning example of what an open-source vehicle interface looks like.

Separately, CAN bus files for the Fisker Ocean have been published on GitHub, including DBC files for CAN viewer filtering and processing. The Ocean...