IT Home, May 17 - In June 2024, American EV startup Fisker filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, leaving about 11,000 Fisker Ocean SUV owners in a difficult situation. These owners spent between $40,000 and $70,000 (IT Home note: approximately RMB 273,000 to 478,000 at current exchange rates) to purchase their vehicles, which are now gradually losing core software functions. Over-the-air update services have been completely terminated, connected services have been fully discontinued, and vehicle warranties have become void—the automaker has gone entirely out of business.
However, instead of watching their cars turn into scrap metal, the owners have banded together on their own: reverse-engineering the vehicle's proprietary software, tapping into the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus system, and building open-source tools on the code hosting platform GitHub. In the ruins of Fisker's bankruptcy, they have spontaneously formed an open-source, volunteer-run grassroots automaker.
Fisker's collapse was shockingly fast. The automaker, once seen as a strong rival to Tesla, had over 31,000 orders for its Ocean SUV, with potential revenue of up to $1.7 billion (approximately 11.605 billion yuan at the current exchange rate). Yet it managed to build only 11,000 vehicles before running out of funds. Bankruptcy filings show its liabilities exceeded $1 billion (approximately 6.826 billion yuan at the current exchange rate).
Electrek, a foreign media outlet, reviewed the Ocean SUV as early as the end of 2023. Its hardware configuration was indeed impressive, but the in-vehicle software was far from meeting commercial standards. The somewhat ironic slogan at the time, "Software updates coming in a later version," has now become the company's epitaph. The automaker failed to deliver on its update promises, and this heavy responsibility ultimately fell on the owners.
The root of the problem lies in the design flaws of the vehicle's overall architecture. Cory Doctorow, a writer and activist in the field of digital rights, bluntly stated that Fisker has built a purely software-dependent car. Almost all subsystems of the Ocean SUV—brakes, airbags, gear-shifting mechanism, battery management system, door locks, etc.—require regular connection to Fisker's cloud servers for fault diagnosis and daily operational scheduling. Once the servers are shut down, not only does the vehicle's infotainment system fail, but various core driving functions also become paralyzed.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin lamented on social media in July 2024: "The automotive industry really needs to embrace open source. It's become the norm for car companies to go under and their vehicles to become instantly worthless, which is truly a shame."
He wasn't wrong, but even Buterin and Doctorow couldn't have predicted the lengths to which car owners would go to save themselves.
Within months of filing for bankruptcy, thousands of Ocean SUV owners formed the Fisker Owners Association, a nonprofit that quickly gathered 4,000 members, functioning as a car enthusiast community, a tech startup, and an independent automaker all at once.
The association hired professional engineers to reverse-engineer Fisker's proprietary software patches; owners taught each other firmware flashing techniques; they organized group purchases for auto parts, driving the price of smart car keys—close to $1,000 each—down to extremely low levels, and offered free key-matching services across multiple locations worldwide, saving each owner between $100 and $250 (roughly 682.6 to 1,707 RMB at current exchange rates).
Car owners in Europe launched a public welfare project called "Mobile Repair Doctor," where car owners skilled in automotive repair travel across regions to help fellow car enthusiasts maintain and repair their vehicles; the association in the United States actively intervened in the bankruptcy judicial process, striving to include the vehicle safety recall program into the bankruptcy proceedings, collaborated with multiple companies to open up parts supply channels, and persuaded several insurance companies to continue providing insurance coverage for this discontinued model.
According to a report by Auto Connected Car News in September 2025, within just half a year, the Fisker Owners Association accomplished numerous feats: securing judicial recall rights for vehicles, establishing a brand-new parts supply chain, stabilizing vehicle insurance services, and building a nascent independent software operation and maintenance ecosystem.
In short, everything the automaker failed to do was accomplished by the car owners one by one.
The technical development behind this self-rescue campaign is the most exciting part of the entire event. What started as simple emergency troubleshooting gradually evolved into a mature and comprehensive open-source technical ecosystem centered around the Fisker Ocean SUV.
Developer Michael Ooi reverse-engineered the API of Fisker's official mobile vehicle app on GitHub, creating a smart home system adapter that converts all vehicle cloud data into sensor data and synchronizes all control buttons within the app into the smart home control system. The project has completed 135 code commits and 20 version iterations, using the Apache 2.0 open-source license, serving as a practical model for open-source in-vehicle interaction systems.
In addition, the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus files for the Fisker Ocean SUV have been publicly uploaded, including filtering and parsing configuration files compatible with bus observation tools. This vehicle model is equipped with four 500kbps vehicle buses, and the car enthusiast community is progressively mapping out the functional circuits of each line.
Tech blogger Mazid Srour has also released a series of practical tutorials detailing how to capture vehicle bus operation data and read vehicle fault diagnostic codes. The core goal is to port vehicle fault diagnosis functions to mobile devices, allowing owners to self-diagnose vehicle faults without relying on the brand's store-specific diagnostic equipment, which has long since disappeared from the market.
In various car owner forums, netizens are hotly debating whether the Ocean SUV's in-vehicle system can be fully open-sourced. Currently, opinions are still divided: the core vehicle system is developed by third-party suppliers such as Magna, and the core programs related to driving safety cannot be arbitrarily rewritten or replicated like ordinary web programs. However, the in-car entertainment system, connected service architecture, and vehicle fault diagnosis programs can all be open-sourced, which has become the core direction of community technical efforts.
The car owners' self-rescue journey has not been smooth. In October 2024, Fisker's remaining inventory vehicles were acquired by a U.S. leasing company. This transaction originally included the exclusive software source code and cloud service usage rights of Fisker. The leasing company spent an additional $2.5 million (approximately 17.066 million yuan at current exchange rates) to obtain the relevant software permissions and also verbally agreed to partner with the car owner association to continue providing vehicle connectivity services to private owners.
However, this cooperation, based solely on a verbal agreement, was never formalized through a written contract. Subsequently, the leasing company demanded that the car owners' association bear 58% of the operating costs, covering mobile communication data, Microsoft cloud services, and various software maintenance fees. The car owners' association requested a detailed breakdown of income and expenses to disclose the use of funds, but their request was rejected by the other party. The partnership completely collapsed, directly resulting in the shutdown of remote connectivity features for the owners' vehicles and a full cut-off of cloud services. The originally planned recall for software faults was also forced to be shelved.
The tragedy of the Fisker Ocean SUV is by no means an isolated case. Nikola Motors also declared bankruptcy, leaving its owners facing the same vehicle usage predicament. Canoo and Arrival are also on the verge of bankruptcy liquidation auctions. As the electric vehicle industry landscape undergoes a reshuffle, capital's enthusiasm for investing in heavy-asset automotive manufacturing is gradually cooling. Industry analysts predict that more emerging new energy vehicle startups will continue to collapse.
Today, consumer rights advocates are pushing for structural reforms in the industry: forcing automakers to set up software escrow reserves to ensure vehicle software continues to function after bankruptcy; adding open-source software handover clauses in corporate bankruptcy proceedings; and compelling automakers to disclose general vehicle repair data. The U.S. state of Oregon has already passed a Right to Repair Act for automobiles, explicitly prohibiting automakers from imposing encryption restrictions tied to spare parts, completely removing barriers to independent repairs for vehicles like the Ocean SUV.
European automakers are taking a different path. In 2025, Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz, together with eight supply chain companies, signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly develop a common open-source in-vehicle software platform.
More new energy vehicle companies will inevitably go bankrupt in the future. The real urgent issue at present is to establish a sound safeguard mechanism to prevent a large number of perfectly usable electric vehicles from becoming electronic waste.
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