Consumer Reports' Fisker Ocean Experience Has Been Unsurprisingly Nightmarish

EV startup Fisker is having a rough go of it. The Henrik Fisker-led company began deliveries of its Ocean crossover a little under a year ago, and it's clear that the car simply wasn't ready. On top of that, the company was almost comically incompetent, even failing to cash customer payments. Now, Fisker is flirting with bankruptcy, dropped prices dramatically, and failed to engineer a tie-up with Nissan.

It's easy to see why, when you look at Consumer Reports' experience with its Fisker Ocean. The publication, which buys its own cars for testing, has had an almost endless list of problems. An hour-long podcast dealing their Ocean saga is great comedy.

Without getting into everything, the problems started from day one. The car was delivered dirty and scratched by an independent operator with a small trailer who didn't know anything about the Ocean itself. CR's testers later unbolted the hood of the Ocean—there's no easy opening mechanism, as Fisker only wants service centers to get under there—and found that the 12-volt battery was from NAPA. Apparently the Ocean sat for around six months before it was delivered, and the original battery died. 

The next day, the car displayed a brake-failure warning on the dash. And when CR started actual testing, they found that the driving-aids couldn't be turned off, and the car veered violently left on the publication's test track. Ironically, on the road, the driver assist systems barely work, especially when it's raining, with blind-spot warnings going off even when there were no other cars around. 

There's so much more, from bad customer service experiences, to Fisker not cashing CR's check. Many of the issues are with software, but with Fisker's future so uncertain, it's looking less and less likely that they'll all be resolved. 

The Ocean might be cheap now, but that doesn't mean it's suddenly a good buy.

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