- Fisker's bankruptcy case reveals vehicle data stored on the company's servers cannot be ported to another location.
- American Lease, the company that agreed to buy the remaining 3,000+ Ocean EVs, filed an emergency objection.
Fisker Ocean owners who want to hold on to their electric vehicles might be faced with a new annoyance as a result of the automaker’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy. According to a new filing from New York-based American Lease–the company that wants to buy more than 3,000 remaining Ocean EVs–Fisker cannot transfer each vehicle’s information to a new server that is not owned by it.
This means over-the-air software updates, remote access to the car via the smartphone app and remote diagnostics will not be available anymore. As reported by TechCrunch, American Lease filed an emergency objection to the automaker’s liquidation plan which was expected to be confirmed in bankruptcy court as early as this Wednesday.
“Now, on the eve of the October 9 Hearing, Buyer has just been informed that Porting of the Purchased Vehicles will not be possible,” American Lease said in the filing. “Buyer cannot overstate the significance of this unwelcome news, conveyed to it only after it has paid the estates tens of millions of dollars under the Purchase Agreement. It is unclear at the present time what, if anything, Debtor representatives have known about the impossibility or impracticability of implementing Porting of the Purchased Vehicles, and when they learned or otherwise knew of that critical information.”
The buyer requested the court deny the liquidation plan if it couldn’t transfer the vehicles’ information to its server. “Confirmation should therefore be denied if the October 9 Hearing moves forward as scheduled,” American Lease added in the emergency objection.
We expect this technical snag to affect all Fisker Ocean owners, not just the 3,000+ vehicles that will potentially be bought at a hefty discount by American Lease. If the information cannot be ported to other servers, everything will be lost when Fisker inevitably shuts down. The cars will likely still be driveable, but they won’t be connected to the cloud anymore.
American Lease also asked the court to delay Wednesday’s hearing so that it can track down Fisker and its representatives to find out more about this problem.
The news comes on top of an already rocky month for the California-based startup. The United States Securities and Exchange Commission said it is looking into Fisker’s activities before the bankruptcy filing. The Department of Justice also filed an objection ahead of Wednesday’s hearing on behalf of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, claiming that Fisker’s attempt to force owners to pay for recall repairs is illegal. And to top it all off, the landlord of Fisker’s former headquarters said the company left the place in “complete disarray,” with clay models and potentially hazardous materials sitting unattended.
