Risky Business? Road-Tripping a Fisker Ocean EV Isn't for the Meek

How adventurous are you feeling? How much risk are you willing to accept? These pre-road-trip thoughts have become rare as modern cars have become so reliable, cell phone coverage widespread, and help increasingly nearby. A breakdown in any car can disrupt or ruin a trip, but when there’s nowhere to send the tow truck but back to your home, how far from home do you really want to be? These thoughts and more went through our heads as we planned to drive our long-term 2023 Fisker Ocean Extreme on a 700-mile road trip to a friend’s reunion.

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Getting Stuck a Legitimate Concern

So far, our Ocean has been very reliable. It’s never failed to start or drive and never locked us out or left us stranded. Yeah, it’s got a few software quirks, but nothing that prevents us from just driving the car. Based solely on personal experience, there’s no reason to doubt it. To be entirely sure, we went out of our way to use a public fast charger for the first time since taking delivery to confirm there wouldn’t be any surprises with this specific car, and there weren’t.

Still, with Fisker bankrupt and nearly all of its service technicians laid off, there’s no safety net. If our car chose this trip to have a software or mechanical issue, there’d be no one to take it to. Maybe we’d get lucky and a local independent repair shop might take a look at it, but without parts or full access to the diagnostic software, they’d only be able to fix so much. While the possibility of being rear-ended or otherwise incapacitated through no fault of our own is ever-present in my own neighborhood, the possibility of it happening 350 miles from home and not being able to drive back is a bigger concern.

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No Need to Worry?

As it happens, past performance was an indicator of future results this time. The Ocean drove the same as it always had. Its comfort-oriented suspension tune and supportive seats made it a great road-tripper.

Not that we didn’t have other problems. The navigation system froze up early in the drive and stayed that way the rest of the day, which has happened before and is why I just use my phone. The servers that support the phone app had a hiccup that weekend and logged me out, requiring a password reset to get back in, though that could’ve happened at any time. (The app is now fully offline.) The only real issue occurred when attempting to unplug our portable charging cord before heading home. Unlocking the car usually unlocks the charger, but this time it didn’t. Locking and unlocking again didn’t work, and the infotainment screen chose this moment to freeze up for a minute and then reboot. Once it was finally back a few minutes later, hitting the digital “unlock charge port” button on the screen released the charger, and we were on our way. Not great, but not the first time an EV has refused to release a charger on me.

Near Miss

Our pre-trip fears were very nearly confirmed, though, when an accident occurred directly in front of us nearly 350 miles from home. In moderate traffic moving at freeway speeds, the car in front of us suddenly dove to the right lane, missing a three-car pileup directly ahead in the left lane by inches. With the right lane now slamming the brakes and backed up, my only option was to go left. The shoulder was just wide enough for me to guide the Ocean between a wrecked Ram at the back of the pileup and the concrete divider. Swerving then standing on the brakes, the Ocean came to a stop as its front wheels wedged themselves against the concrete and the Ram’s front driver-side wheel. Incredibly, the only damage was some scrapes on the Ocean’s front passenger-side wheel. The Fisker Ocean isn’t especially sporty, and it often has driver assistance systems faults, but when I needed it to respond precisely in an emergency scenario, it delivered. We’re still driving it to this day, none the worse for wear (front passenger-side wheel scratches excepted).

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Public Charging Woes

The other problem we faced on our journey was also no fault of the Fisker’s. Public charging infrastructure, even in California, is far from infallible. Actual charger reliability has improved greatly in my experience, but there are other problems. Vandalism has taken many public chargers offline recently as copper thieves cut off charging cables in the middle of the night, reducing the number of available chargers. Rolling replacements of older charging towers with new models has taken a number of stations offline for weeks at a time. Both issues slowed us down as we had to reroute to less convenient stations or slower chargers.

The worst of it struck on the drive home. We knew road-tripping on the Sunday after July 4th would be a nightmare, as by all accounts it was the busiest single travel day in American history. Driving an EV long distances on a day like that was asking for trouble. We wouldn’t know just how much until we were in the thick of it.

I usually make a point of avoiding charging at Harris Ranch on Interstate 5. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a wonderful place. Great food, lots of parking, convenient location. The problem is, it only has six Electrify America CCS-type chargers, and being roughly halfway between Southern California and the Bay Area, it’s where everyone stops to charge going north or south, so there’s always a line.

This time, the line was never fewer than 30 cars long, so it took us 2 hours and 50 minutes to get on a charger. I’d have gone somewhere else, but the new station I stopped at first was still under construction, and the larger station in Kettleman City was beyond my remaining 6 percent battery range. (A fellow EV driver later told me it, too, had a line around the block despite having 10 chargers.) Making this all the more frustrating was the fact there are 98 Tesla Superchargers across the parking lot and never more than three cars in line. Had I driven the long-term Model Y instead, I’d have been in and out in barely more time than it takes to actually charge.

Being so low on juice and not wanting to stop again, we ate dinner while the car took 53 minutes to reach 85 percent state of charge. (The polite thing to do given the line would’ve been to stop at 80, but the extra 5 percent only took a couple minutes, during which I filled out our charging log, and it gave us a bigger range buffer to reach home.) The Ocean is capable of charging at up to 250 kW in deal conditions, but 108-degree ambient temperature had the battery cooling system working hard, so we never even hit 200 kW, hence the somewhat longer charge than the 35 minutes or less it should be capable of.

It's a problem of highly concentrated demand that’ll be eased in the future for most EV owners. Harris Ranch is no longer the only game in town, with other charging stations relatively close by either already open or waiting to be switched on. Beyond that, increased access to Superchargers for non-Tesla vehicles will spread out demand even further. Unfortunately, while Fisker once promised to switch to the Tesla-developed NACS/J3000 charging port in 2025, the bankruptcy means it’ll almost certainly never happen. Fisker won’t be around to send adapters or work with Tesla to ensure software compatibility. While third-party adapters already exist to handle the former, the latter is probably insurmountable unless American Lease, which bought just over 3,200 unsold Oceans from Fisker recently along with access to the company’s diagnostic software and source code, wants to try to talk Tesla into it. Seems unlikely.

Would We Do It Again?

Probably. The Fisker hasn’t given us any reason not to yet. The dead app and the built-in navigation system are easy to avoid, and the locked charging port thing has only happened once. As for crashes, statistically, we’re all far more likely to be in a crash in our own neighborhoods than we are on a road trip, and the end result is more or less the same. The only thing that can really change is the towing bill, and we decide where it gets towed. Public charging, meanwhile, is an issue for all non-Tesla EVs without Supercharger access, and that’s not the car’s fault. Road tripping on the busiest road-trip day of the year is on us.

For More on Our Long-Term Fisker Ocean Extreme:

• Our Fisker Ocean Just Arrived For A Yearlong Test. Then Its Maker Went Bankrupt.
• We Know Fisker’s Bankrupt, But What’s It Like As A Car?

Sea Salt Interior ($2,500: white Alcantara interior color); 22-inch F06 Vortex wheels ($1,450); Sea Grass paint ($975); Retractable cargo cover ($199)