Everything That’s Gone Wrong With Our Fisker Ocean

Every Fisker Ocean we’ve ever driven has had software bugs. It was forgivable on the prototypes, but continued bugs marred the launch and continued to plague the car throughout its short production run. We didn’t get our test gear on one until 10 months after it went on sale, and that car still had bugs. When I took possession of our yearlong review 2023 Fisker Ocean Extreme a full year after sales started, it too was buggy, so much so I decided to catalog every problem we’ve had with the car. They’ve all been software related.

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An Inauspicious Start

I knew I was in for some annoyances when we asked Fisker to loan us its electric SUV for a year, but I didn’t expect them to start on day one. Nonetheless, within a few minutes of being handed the key fob, our Ocean was already having issues. I picked the car up from Fisker’s La Palma, California, facility and punched my home address into the navigation, 21 miles away. The system thought about it for a moment, then declared the destination to be 1,865 miles away and impossible to route to. Thankfully, it worked correctly on the second try.

While I was waiting for the nav to sort itself out, I noticed a few other things. Up at the top of the massive center screen, the external temperature was reading 175 degrees Fahrenheit. It eventually fixed itself on the ride home, adjusting downward to 81 degrees. As it was indeed warm out, I had the A/C cranked, and although it was blowing nice and cold, I couldn’t help but notice the temperature readout on the little black-and-white screen below the big screen was showing the temperature set to max heat even though I’d just dialed in 70 degrees.

It didn’t end there. On the drive home, I had my first encounter with the recurring radar fault that disables all the active safety systems like collision warning and automatic emergency braking (and sometimes blind-spot monitoring, too). This fault has popped up at least once a month. More often, I just get the blinded camera warning when driving into the sun that also disables the anti-collision systems, but that at least goes away when I turn.

Finally home, I went to plug in and discovered the Ocean has no scheduled charging feature. No problem, I’d just manually stop charging from the infotainment screen during peak hours and manually restart it later. Turns out, though, if you leave the car plugged in but not charging, it’ll just automatically restart charging after a few minutes. It was also during this initial home charging experience I discovered there’s no way to disable the loud musical tone the car plays when it starts and stops charging. That was exciting to wake up to at 4 a.m. the next day. Sorry, neighbors.

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Learning to Live With It

As I mentioned in previous updates, the Ocean is a pretty nice car to drive as long as you don’t need any of the tech features. The second time the radar fault cropped up, I decided I’d simply treat the car as if it had no active safety features installed and not expect them to work in an emergency. The nav was so slow and buggy, so I just used my phone, which is what most people do anyway.

As the days and weeks passed, more bugs and quirks presented themselves for me to adapt to. Initially, I believed the cruise control was completely nonfunctional (not just the adaptive cruise control, which Fisker never enabled), but it turns out you have to push the cruise control’s steering-wheel button at least twice (if not three times) to activate it. I also turned off the red light notification feature, which threw so many false alarms by reading the wrong lights it was frustrating and occasionally dangerous. I left the green light notification on as it works better and is helpful if you’re not paying attention when the light changes.

It was in these early days I first encountered the regenerative braking problem that would eventually lead to a recall. When using heavy regeneration to slow quickly, every so often the braking force would suddenly diminish and the pedals would vibrate as if ABS were activating. It’s easy enough to simply step on the brake pedal and engage the mechanical brakes, but it’s also a little disconcerting. The problem was eventually solved by an over-the-air (OTA) software update as part of a recall campaign.

I was less than a month into the loan when the nav froze for the first time and stayed that way for the rest of the day. Key cycles didn’t fix it, but sitting overnight did. It was around this time I had my first issue with the stereo, in which FM abruptly stopped working. Changing sources brough it back, but it was a preview of issues to come. Also making its first appearance in this time period was the intermittent “DRL malfunction warning,” which was a false alarm. It’s happened so many times, I don’t even bother to check if a daytime running lamp is out because they’ve always been fine.

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Charging Is Hard

Those first few weeks are also when I learned not to trust the charging system’s time estimates. The initial readout is always wildly wrong, but it usually corrects itself after about 30 seconds. On our first public fast charging attempt, though, it simply read “16 minutes remaining” for the full hour and six minutes the charge took.

About a week later, I had my first real panic about being stranded far from home. After charging overnight at a friend’s house on a third-party portable Level 2 charger, the car refused to release the charger after I pressed the stop button on the infotainment screen. Then, the whole screen went dark for several minutes before finally rebooting itself. I breathed a rather large sigh of relief when I pressed the rebooted stop button again and the charging port unlocked.

Keeping an eye on your battery level is critical, because the Ocean loses about 1 percent state of charge and 4 miles of range sitting overnight. The high-voltage battery pack is also responsible for keeping the 12-volt car battery charged, and you don’t want to let the little one die. It’s under the hood, which is bolted closed and a real pain to get to. Many Ocean owners install battery tenders and monitors to avoid a time-consuming replacement.

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Stereo Plays the Blues

The second month of stewardship was when the stereo really started to act up; the FM thing was only a taste. Bluetooth quit working altogether one day, both music and phone. Technically, it was still there, but it kept disconnecting and reconnecting and disconnecting from my and my wife’s phones. Four days later, it fixed itself, though the problem has returned sporadically. Sometimes it can be solved by digging into the Bluetooth settings and manually engaging phone and music on the phone you want, but not always.

A few months later, things really went haywire. The stereo developed a new glitch where the volume would default to level 5 (which is a little loud) every time you turned on the car, no matter where you had set it previously. The same day that started, all the volume controls except the mute button quit working. Neither the steering wheel scroll wheel nor the rocker switch below the screen worked. It was while troubleshooting that problem I realized all the steering wheel controls had stopped working. A key cycle didn’t solve the issue, but letting it sit for several hours did (after a very long screen bootup).

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Fob, App, and Trust Issues

Far and away the most consistent sources of issues have been the key fob and phone app. Fob problems started on the third day, when it suddenly started taking multiple button presses to get any of the key fob functions to work, and even then, only at extremely close range. Later, it would have trouble reading the fob from my pocket, forcing me to fish it out and rub it around on the bottom of the steering column until the car agreed to start. I later learned this was a sign the key fob battery is getting low, which the car will eventually get around to telling you once it’s really low.

As with our Lucid Air, the key fob burns through batteries in a matter of months (we’re on our third), so it’s good to keep a stash in your house. Let it die, lose it, or lock it in the car, and your only hope is the phone app. Short on cash, Fisker only delivered one fob per car, and finding a replacement is neither cheap nor easy. The app, unfortunately, is as buggy as the car and prone to signing you out. It also can’t communicate with the car if the car has been off too long and gone into hibernation mode. With Fisker’s bankruptcy, it’s also an open question how much longer the app will even work, as we’ve been kicked out of it for weeks on end already. Even when it’s working, half the time it reports an error and says the command wasn’t completed, even if it was.

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Miscellaneous Bugs

Much as I love California Mode, it always makes me a little nervous. You push the switch on the ceiling, and it opens every window in the car except the windshield. Pull the switch, and it closes them. It’s fantastic at evacuating all the hot air in the cabin on a sunny day. I made the mistake once, though, of pulling the switch (close) instead of pushing (open) when the windows were closed and opened the sunroof, rear windows, and driver door only. I opened the rest of the door windows manually, then pulled it again to close them all. This got the rears and the sunroof closed, but not the door windows, and when I manually raised them, I discovered the one-touch up/down function had stopped working. Thankfully, it all fixed itself after a key cycle.

It wasn’t the only California Mode issue I had. On another occasion, I’d successfully deployed the mode, but when I went to close everything back up at the end of my drive, one of the rear “doggie” windows didn’t roll up. Going through the whole opening and closing sequence again fixed it, but with no way to manually control those little windows behind the rear doors, it makes me nervous using California Mode should they ever get truly stuck open.

That would be inconvenient at best, but another occasional bug is potentially dangerous. Sometimes when parking on a hill, pressing the Park button on the shifter stalk won’t actually put the car in park, nor will it stay in drive or reverse. Instead, the instrument screen flashes a warning too quickly to read, and the car goes into neutral instead, at which point the Ocean will start to roll away if your foot isn’t on the brake. Thankfully, I’ve always caught it before opening the door to get out, and pushing the Park button again does the trick.

One More for Good Measure

At the end of September, Fisker rolled out the only OTA software update I’ve seen since I got the car. OS 2.2 primarily fixed that regenerative braking issue I mentioned earlier, but as a parting gift, it introduced a new bug in the electronically controlled air vents. Normally, the vents open and close themselves when the HVAC system is turned on and off, which for me is usually when I turn the car on or off. This fun new bug prevents the vents from opening when the car is turned on, so on a particularly hot or cold day you’ll hear the fan going full blast but feel no airflow. The system, of course, thinks the vents are open, so the only way to fix it is to go into the climate control menu on the infotainment screen and manually “close” and reopen all four dashboard vents individually every time you start the car.

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Now What?

As you’ve likely heard, Fisker is bankrupt and in the final stages of being liquidated. A handful of remaining employees are working to finish a handful of recalls before turning out the lights for the final time. All its remaining cars have been sold to American Lease, which will rent them to rideshare drivers. That company has agreed to take over Fisker’s servers and continue to operate them for the time being, but as of this writing, the phone app is down again.

Whether it'll ever work again is up to American Lease now, as are any future software updates and bug fixes for the cars themselves. We suspect both are unlikely as the company isn’t in the business of manufacturing or modifying cars. It picked up the Oceans for cheap, and it’ll keep them running and renting them out as long as it’s profitable. Developing software patches and maintaining a cloud-based app platform may be deemed business critical, but then again, maybe not. Whether the company will do anything to help private owners if it does keep the servers online or develop patches also remains to be seen, though it has been in contact with the Fisker Owners Association about working together.

For everyone watching from the sidelines, this is one of the biggest risks in buying a car from a startup company. Not just the possibility the software may be unfinished when you buy the car, but that you may lose critical backend support if the company fails.

For More on Our Long-Term 2023 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 This SUV Like as a Car?
• Risky Business? Road-Tripping a Fisker Ocean EV Isn't for the Meek
• The SUV of the Year Review of Our 2023 Fisker Ocean Extreme (Sort Of)

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