Fisker

Henrik Fisker had drawn the BMW Z8 and the Aston Martin DB9 before his first EV company, Fisker Automotive, collapsed in 2013 when its battery supplier went bankrupt. He kept the name, and in October 2016 he and Geeta Gupta-Fisker — who would serve as CFO and COO — founded Fisker Inc. in Los Angeles. The founding couple structure would define the company to the end: husband as CEO and chief designer, wife controlling the finances and operations, and, as reporting later showed, few internal checks on either. The pitch was that the first company had died making hardware, so the second would barely touch it — an 'asset-light' automaker that owned the design and the customer relationship while contract manufacturers carried the factories.

Fisker caught the 2020 SPAC boom perfectly, merging with Apollo-sponsored Spartan Energy Acquisition Corp in a deal valuing it at $2.9 billion post-money that closed on October 29, 2020 and put more than $1 billion of cash on the balance sheet before a single car existed. When a partnership with iPhone-assembler Foxconn to build a sub-$30,000 EV called the Pear was announced in February 2021, the stock hit an all-time closing high of $28.50 — a market value approaching $8 billion. The company raised another $667.5 million in green convertible notes that August. On paper, Fisker was among the best-funded EV startups of the era; in practice it had booked most of its capital before facing any of the problems of actually building, delivering, and servicing cars.

Unlike most SPAC-era EV companies, Fisker shipped. Magna signed a long-term manufacturing agreement in June 2021, and the Ocean SUV started production on schedule at Magna Steyr's carbon-neutral plant in Graz, Austria, on November 17, 2022 — a genuine validation of the asset-light thesis. First deliveries came in Copenhagen in May 2023. But the model's flaw emerged immediately: Fisker had outsourced the factory but not the hard parts. Software was unfinished at launch, service infrastructure barely existed, and the direct-sales operation couldn't process the cars Magna was producing. By year-end 2023 Fisker had built 10,193 Oceans and delivered just 4,929, with hundreds of millions of dollars of unsold inventory parked in lots while the company burned cash.

2024 opened with NHTSA investigating braking and power loss in the Ocean (January), then unintended rollaway (February), then doors that wouldn't open from inside or out (April), then automatic emergency braking failures (May); a door-latch recall eventually covered more than 12,000 vehicles. In March, TechCrunch revealed the company had temporarily lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments — checks uncashed or misplaced, some cars delivered without collecting payment at all — triggering a months-long internal audit on top of previously disclosed material weaknesses in its financial controls. On February 29 Fisker issued a going-concern warning, laid off 15% of its roughly 1,300 staff, and abandoned direct sales for a dealer model. On March 29 it cut the Ocean Extreme's price by $24,000 to $37,499. Nothing moved the metal fast enough.

The endgame was quick. Talks with a large automaker — widely reported to be Nissan — collapsed in late March 2024, killing a deal that had been a condition for $350 million in additional financing. The NYSE suspended trading on March 25 and delisted the stock in April; a planned $150 million convertible sale fell through. After months of layoffs shrank the company to about 150 people, operating unit Fisker Group Inc. filed for Chapter 11 in Delaware on June 17, 2024, listing up to $1 billion in assets against up to $500 million in liabilities. In July the bankruptcy court approved selling the remaining fleet of 3,231 Oceans to American Lease for up to $46.25 million — roughly $14,000 per vehicle for cars that had listed at $61,499 months earlier. The Pear, the Alaska pickup, and the Ronin convertible never got past prototypes. Henrik Fisker had become the rare founder to lose two car companies with the same name on the door.