Against all odds, the first Fisker Ocean rolled off the production line a little over two years ago. It was supposed to be the car that brought Henrik Fisker back into the limelight as the CEO of a new electric car company. Soon, Fisker’s poor management would drive his EV startup into bankruptcy, leaving owners holding the bag. Many of them do still have their cars, but as Edmunds found out recently, the Ocean is now nearly worthless. In fact, its value dropped by $57,000 in less than a year.
Typically, when Edmunds adds a new car to its long term test fleet, it keeps it for at least a year and drives it for at least 20,000 miles. It isn’t enough to tell you how well the car will hold up in a decade, but that’s also far more than the vast majority of people drive in a year and should give you a pretty good idea of what you’d be getting yourself into if you bought the same car. Unfortunately for Edmunds, the Ocean didn’t even make it that far, and as the long term wrap-up put it, after “11 months and only 7,000 miles into Ocean ownership, it’s time to jump ship.”
Part of that is, of course, because Fisker went bankrupt, and it wasn’t only because they were only able to trade in their $70,000 Ocean Extreme for about $13,000 even though the car is less than a year old. Four months into ownership, they’d already replaced the battery in the key fob twice, and they continued to have problems locking and unlocking the car right up until they traded it in. Regenerative braking was also difficult to modulate, the infotainment system was “a mess from the start.” Fisker never rolled out many of the features it promised such as adaptive cruise control and many of the user experience decisions were confusing. For example, considering how many cameras are on the Ocean, why wouldn’t Fisker offer a top-down view of the car for easier parking?
Edmunds’ senior social media content strategist Ryan Greger may have said it best when he wrote:
I have never had so many issues with a vehicle in a 72-hour period. The key has worked about 25% of the time; more often than not, it takes more than 10 clicks to unlock the car, and once I’m inside, it either won’t detect the key or forces me to tap it against the NFC reader to go into gear. Additionally, the car sometimes fails to fully shut down — it will lock, but it won’t chirp, and you can see the systems still active inside. At one point, I was driving the car and randomly got a driver-assistance failure notification, though I wasn’t using any of the systems at the time, so I’m not sure what effect there actually was (if any), and that warning went away the next time I drove the car. It took me 30-plus minutes to get my phone to pair via Bluetooth, and even after doing so it’s very finicky. I’ve been having to both select my phone from the car and the car from my phone’s Bluetooth menu to be able to stream music or take phone calls; otherwise they’ll all play from my phone even though the car says it’s connected. The touchscreen itself is slow in general — especially the backup camera, which always has around a 5-second delay before turning on when in reverse. The rear touchscreen, however, is extremely laggy. At one point the rear right heated seat refused to turn on; this was rectified by cycling the vehicle on and off. In a nutshell: The Ocean made me so frustrated I was about ready to drive it into the ocean.
There’s a lot more in the longterm wrap-up, so head on over to Edmunds to give the whole thing a read.