EV startup Fisker's collapse: how the company crumbled
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Fisker sounds like an amateur operation through and through. On top of the spare parts reserves, one of the things manufacturers often do for a hardware product, especially something as expensive as a car, is find a warranty insurance underwriter. Their underwriter would have easily helped them avoid most of these problems as they've got a lot of experience auditing manufacturing lines and products for serviceability.
> Many were told at the time to tackle the backlog of unprocessed title and registration paperwork, which had left hundreds of customers without permanent license plates.
> The company had already scrambled to perform an internal audit to track down the missing $16 million in customer payments.
Is there a phrase that means the opposite of "attention to detail?" Every little detail is a shitshow
I was in car sales and was top 0.1% nationwide at it. Eventually I moved into management. And while sales for the dealership as a whole went up considerably, paperwork became a nightmare. The office lady's were at their breaking point after 6 months and wrote to the owner that in their 30 years of managing the dealership back office, they had never seen such bad paperwork processes.
Sometimes the people good at driving things forward are terrible at cleaning up after themselves.
I was great at sales, and became a sales manager thus sales for the whole team went up considerably. I had guys twice my age coming to me thanking me for helping them earn more than they ever had in their sales career.
Why someone thought it made sense to task me with managing the sale of 150 cars a month, helping 10+ salespeople close deals AND random bs dealer paperwork not at all related to sales I will never understand. But that's what the industry does. Usually average sales people are promoted to sales manager, so they don't focus on helping salespeople that much, and instead enjoy the random paperwork associated with the position.
I wasn't willing to hurt sales of the team in order to have time to do paperwork, so I let all the paperwork slip. Other people let the sales slip so paperwork stayed correct.
Sounds like Fisker was pinching pennies everywhere they could, so even if they were quoted something they could afford, they probably passed.
Fisker sure fucked the pooch, but even the 'big boys' have royally fucked things up when they really have no excuse given their engineering, design, manufacturing, etc. The Chevy Bolt had tons of problems with its infotainment system, the seats were horrible to sit in, and then the battery defects came to light.
The Ford Mach E is a shitshow in terms of thermal management, overheating at the drop of a hat. The "performance" model is actually slower to accelerate to highway speeds because it overheats faster and throttles back its power.
The BMW i3 was an unreliable lemon that depreciated like a rock once they started coming off lease.
The VW ID3 was full of incredibly shitty UX design decisions and an infotainment system that was so slow it was almost useless - and the system was how you controlled almost everything in the car.
Read forums from when these models came out and you'll often see similar problems to Fisker's. Cars that have a system fail, the dealership struggles to diagnose it because there's poor service training and documentation, and the customer waits for weeks for parts to show up. Software glitches up the ass, etc.
Fisker we can all understand; it's easy to see the problems like terrible leadership and incompetence throughout the org. But at BMW, Ford, GM, VW - it's actually much worse, because on paper they should be the best equipped. They have massive abilities and experience in terms of research, development, design, manufacturing, parts distribution, service, etc - not to mention very deep pockets.
There's really no excuse for the foibles these companies have had, because aside from the drivetrain, everything else can be the same - and the car is massively simpler to boot, with a lower part and system count. There's no exhaust, no emissions control, no fuel, no oil (well, save gear case/diff oil), no hydraulics, cooling needs are much lower, etc.
I think what it came down to is that early EVs are not profitable, so oddly enough, there was probably the same pressure to cut every cost possible, from staffing to component selection to design. Why else, for example, would the ID3 have an infotainment system with a SoC clearly not capable of handling the software it was tasked to run?
That definitely wasn't about penny pinching, obviously the increase in quality of a better chip would completely outweigh the costs.
Issues like these exist because of a very large and diffuse organization which develops cars over many years. At some early point in time a chip is choosen (by the time the car is built it is already outpaced by cheaper chips) and resources on that chip are allocated to different development groups, which then have to fight one another and themselves to get their software done within the resources allocated them.
The problem is that the moment any of the initial assumptions about the engineering are violated, the chip becomes insufficient and UX suffers. At that point in time changing the chip would actually delay when the car can be produced, so the internal politics increases to figure out how to make it work.
The ID3 was also especially bad since it was the first car of a new Platform and obviously in the planning of the E/E for that platform the need for processing power for the Infotainment system was severely underestimated. And while that decision certainly concerned money, it definitely wouldn't have been made if the consequences had been visible at that point in time.
I've used "fractally fucked" before, which I think is nicely evocative of how something is messed up at every level of detail.
That’s what the lemon lawsuits mentioned in TFA are about. Without spare parts, entire sales get nullified and the refunded cars can’t be resold as new.
If anything, as a smaller company you should be able to offer better customer service (‘do things that can’t scale’). I.E. at fiskers scale you could do this with a couple of shelving units and one person looking after the ‘spares’ department who also communicates directly to the customer.
The fact that they aren’t all over this does show either a lack of detail, a lack of cash, a lack of resource, or a combination of all three.
Fisker wanted to sell hundreds of thousands of cars.
If you want to sell a car, that is one of the things you, as a manufacturer, just have to do in order to get people to trust you.
A manufacturer who's cars can not be repaired isn't worth anyone's money. Also for every car there are a few specific parts which experience high wear and absolutely should be ordered in quantities to keep up with demand for repairs.
That's why the article calls this "standard industry practice", not sure why you didn't get that.
Could be worse. Remember Faraday Future? Even worse, Nikola and their fake truck.[1]
It'd be really nice if documentation+code for these was made public but this likely won't happen so you can't buy one of these even as a hacking hobby.
I'll pay $100 for your massive paperweight. Maybe I'll figure it out, maybe I won't, but the potential of getting a car like that for a price like that is definitely worth the $100 + towing fees to me.
And the customer service and spare parts issues are, as well.
This will require either standardizing on a system for swappable batteries, dramatic improvements in fast charging infrastructure, or a generational leap in battery efficiency.
Did we read the same article? The problem was absolutely the cars.
Don’t expect big leap in battery efficiency anytime soon, and battery swapping projects tend to fail already without the standardisation challenge.
If you buy a lower range battery and save 5k on the purchase price, well if you go on 2 road trips a year at $500 of rental cost per trip, you're looking at 5 year of rentals, not counting the money you save from owning an EV.
On my case I saved over 12k buying "low range" EV (only around 200 miles) which is over a decade of rentals for road trips before I lose money on it, and driving an EV is so much nicer than an IC. I test drive a Lexus and chose a Chevy Bolt EUV instead because the Bolt was nicer to drive than the luxury car! (The Lexus has a better interior obviously).
If you are in the market for a Lexus you are by definition in the 1% of car buyers.
I truly believe EVs will fade away into niche items for enthusiasts, with hybrids taking over the market. Toyota is playing the long game and is right on this one. The rush to widespread EV adoption is being spurred by activists who fail to see the big picture. There is a major lack of infrastructure problem that continues to be ignored and isn't being addressed.
I am saying Americans who are choosing between buying an EV but are afraid of range limits will be just fine buying an EV with lower range and using the savings to rent a car for the times they need to go more than 300 miles at once.
> If you are in the market for a Lexus you are by definition in the 1% of car buyers.
The used Lexus (Hybrid!) I was looking at was 35k, the average price of a new car in America. The engine was noisy and it had the worst implementation of a hybrid drive train I'd ever seen. Anything more than the slightest press on the throttle and the gas engine kicked on, it was absurdly useless.
Fwiw you can get a good EV for 18k (year or two old Chevy Bolt EV) and a brand new EV for 26k (Hyundai has a 7500 off for everyone for new Kona Electrics).
> The rush to widespread EV adoption is being spurred by activists who fail to see the big picture.
Somehow other counties, including huge ones like China, are not having issues with EV adoption.
> I truly believe EVs will fade away into niche items for enthusiasts,
EVs are simpler to make and have far less mechanical complexity. Battery prices are dropping every year and there is an obscene amount of research going into ensuring that trend continues. Once battery prices drop a bit more EVs will be far cheaper to build, buy, and maintain.
I actually looked at a plug in hybrid, the Kia Niro EV. A boring compact car with a hybrid drive train that you can plug in.
$40k USD for a compact Kia. The regular model is around 30k, the hybrid 35, and the plug in hybrid was 40.
Or, buy a brand new EV for $26k.
How exactly so hybrids make any sense? They are a psychological crutch against fears of range anxiety.
But again, ultimately none of this matters because EVs keep getting cheaper every year and they'll continue to get cheaper. As a species we've been making DC motors for almost 140 years, we are really damn good at making them reliable and efficient.
> There is a major lack of infrastructure problem that continues to be ignored and isn't being addressed.
In q2 of 2023 over 1000 fast chargers were installed in the US.
To create a proper growth curve for EVs, deployment doesn't have to be evenly spread out across the US.
If you replace 30% of cars in the top 5 US metro areas, you've created a huge market.
Heck just solve charging in NYC and SF. Then do other dense cities (Chicago, Boston, etc) and then the market becomes big enough that it is self sustaining w/o needing government help.
Fisker doesn't make cars. They design and develop some parts of cars (e.g. they even bought an existing platform) to be produced by others.
The product was far too late and underestimated how hard it is to just design the passenger facing elements of a car.
Did you happen to find one with these data?
More data absent insights just lowers the SNR.
[1] https://investors.fiskerinc.com/financials/quarterly-results....
That’s noise absent insights. It contributes nothing to the article, and was properly left out. If this were a story about Fisker’s stock price it would be germane, but from a glance that doesn’t seem to be where the signal is. The team and operations are. (It’s not on the brink of collapse, either. It’s collapsed. As communicated by the title.)
sigh
"Bollinger says its pickup and SUV will each cost $125,000" https://www.inverse.com/innovation/bollinger-b1-b2-release-d...
Sounds rather optimistic to me.
Hopefully they will do a larger EV soon, something like a next-gen fully electric Duster or Jogger.
The i3 is a fun rear wheel drive car and the mx-30 is an old ICE adapted front wheel drive. Many people don’t care but car enthusiasts do.
The i3 was a carbon fiber body on an aluminium frame with plastic body panels, with an unique interior and choice of materials. The MX-30 is a bit boring.
But the MX-30 kept the annoying doors and the failed hybrid concept.
I think the MX-30 arrived too late for its specs.
I'll have to say the i3s was not fun to drive in the winter with its really narrow tires and its propensity for getting stuck in the worn down tracks of other cars.
Great and nimble in the city though.
The i3 is for sure not the best winter car but I didn’t have major issues in the Oslo area. Also thin tires is somewhat better in the snow. At least that’s what they go with in WRC.
It's a hybrid with the engine ripped out - there's literally huge empty space under the hood, but they haven't even bothered to move things around to make a frunk.
I get that Mazda has a reputable brand, but MX-30 is just an F.U. to the state of California. Mazda sells less than 10 of them per month. Not ten thousand. Just ten.
There are small-battery trims of many EVs in the similar price range, usually with faster charging and better range: Kona, MG4, e-C4, Zoe, e-208, Fiat e500, for a slightly higher price there's Volvo EX30. And among short-range difficult-to-charge cars Leaf is cheaper.
And just out of curiosity, I compared local pricing (CAD) - a Kona starts $47k after rebates and incentives and an MX-30 starts at $39k, so pretty hefty difference. For that matter, even the Leaf starts at $42k.
As for the Leaf, I wouldn't consider an EV without active cooling on the batteries unless the manufacturer included a lifetime battery warranty.
I've literally never seen any such marketing. All I've done is look at the spec sheet.
> MX-30 is heavier than Leaf, Kona, and even Tesla Model 3 SR/RWD.
Not the Kona. Marginally heavier than the lowest trim of the Leaf.
But by having a smaller battery, the impression to me is that the weight goes to something useful, rather than battery, so I'm getting more car for the weight. (The base MX-30 is notably more featurful than the base Leaf.) Plus more car for the price, as I've previously mentioned.
If that's your definition of BS, then there's basically no vehicle on the market for you, with any energy source. But we can read the subtext: you want an EV but don't want to buy a Tesla.
My advice to you is to rent a Model 3/Y LR for a few weeks from Turo or wherever and see if your actual problems are with the actual technical details you think are your problem. Most likely they're not, and in fact you're probably going to recoil from the idea of driving the car at all. In which case, well, at least you know to have the fight on the right grounds. "I hate Musk" is unfalsifiable, so the rest of us can stop trying to explain how well the UI actually works.
Illegal to sell new, at least in Europe and US (see e.g. driver drowsiness detection) and very few people actually want such a car.
The only reason to ever make such a car would be for low cost, production, but in the car industry low cost can only be achieved with high volumes and since such a car absolutely has no mass appeal it is a pretty dead concept.
And everyone who has tried to sell anything knows that "I would pay for that" are words most commonly spoken by people who assuredly would not pay for that.
There is no way any car manufacturer is stupid enough for that.
Used cars outsell new cars by about 3:1 in the US. And if you look at the actual sales figures for the cheapest new cars on the US market, the situation is clear: buyers prefer nicer used cars to minimalistic new cars.
And the license plates of course.
Wheel Spacers
Why?
It makes car look cooler.
Just. (Facepalm)
The engineers probably loved that. /s
Folks, the geometry of your drive train was painstakingly designed by engineers who put a lot of effort into getting a lot that geometry correct. Wheel spacers?
Just don't.
Pick a reason. Change in geometry causing sub optimal shifts in loads. Or poorly designed spacers causing wheels to fly off. Or even the fact that the bearings weren't designed with the spacer in mind, and all the problems concomitant with that fact.
Just don't.
That executives at a car company thought this was a good idea?
I don't even know what to say to that?
But I do think that for an experienced engineer it should have been a kind of canary in the coal mine. If this can happen? Yeah, this company is going nowhere fast.