Fisker Ocean Yearlong Review: We Know Fisker’s Bankrupt, But What’s This SUV Like as a Car?

The vast majority of reporting on Fisker has been about the company’s software and, lately, its finances. Looking for a review of the 2023 Fisker Ocean that talks entirely about how it drives? How comfortable and spacious it is or isn’t? How quiet or loud it is inside? Well, you’ve come to the right place. For this review of our long-term Ocean Extreme, we’re setting aside the software for the moment. There’s plenty to talk about there and we’ll come back to it in a later update, but for now we want to focus on the Ocean as a car that gets you from A to B.

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Looks Good

Cars are an emotional purchase, and the Ocean helps you feel good before you even sign the paperwork. Henrik Fisker is a designer by trade, and here he and his team have crafted a very good-looking SUV. Big fender bulges from taut body sides, a sloping roof, and a fairly low ride height make the Ocean look more like a big hot hatch than a boxy SUV—more Range Rover Evoque than Land Rover Defender. The use of exterior lighting, from the light-up name and logos to the unusual turn signal repeaters in the D-pillars and animated strips on the solar panel roof give the car a unique and forward-looking character.

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Drives Like An EV

While the big wheels pushed out to the corners under swollen fenders certainly lend an aggressive stance, the Ocean isn’t sporty per se. Like all EVs with floor-mounted batteries, an inherently low center of gravity helps the Fisker feel planted in corners, but the body motions don’t lend an enthusiasm for performance driving. It goes around a bend well enough but exhibits no eagerness for them and doesn’t encourage you to drive faster. Think of it more as a stylish boulevardier, not a performance SUV.

That’s not to say it isn’t quick. With up to 564 hp and 543 lb-ft available (554 hp without using launch control), the dual-motor all-wheel-drive Ocean Extreme gets up and goes when you ask it to. Short on-ramps and passing zones are easily dispatched with a healthy dose of right foot, which is certainly fun. Yes, Boost mode launch control starts are limited to 500 over the life of the vehicle, but we’re not worried about it. (We have 493 left.)

We just wish we could change the default drive mode to the middle Fun instead of the base Earth, Fisker’s name for its Eco mode. Fun not only gives us the natural response from the accelerator we prefer but also, more crucially right now in the dead of summer, releases full air conditioning power. In a few months when the heat breaks, Earth mode will be perfectly serviceable for most drives, but right now we need max AC, so changing drive mode with the button on the steering wheel is literally the first thing we do when we get in and start the car. The good news is, once the interior is fully chilled, you can switch back to Earth mode and get noticeably better efficiency while maintaining enough A/C power, even when it’s in the 90s outside. We’ve yet to use the highest performance Hyper mode for anything but testing, as it makes the accelerator oversensitive.

We’d also like a bit more tuning on the automatic hill hold feature. The Ocean doesn’t have a “creep” mode, and the hill hold only engages if you press the brake pedal far enough. Coming to a stop when climbing a hill, this means you need to get your foot on the brake immediately because the car will roll backward if you don’t. Same if you’re using the high regenerative braking setting and don’t touch the brake pedal after coming to a stop even on a slight slope. We’ve started to roll away a couple times, and it’s disconcerting at best.

What we’d really like to change, though, is the regenerative braking system. It just isn’t as fully developed as those in other EVs and takes a very precise foot to slow the car smoothly. It also tends to get discombobulated over rough pavement, in some situations sending a vibration through the accelerator pedal that feels for all the world like ABS engagement in a brake pedal. The actual brake pedal also needs a somewhat deft touch, as it’s too sensitive in some situations, and a small amount of travel is enough to throw heads forward. Particularly when using the high regenerative braking setting, the Ocean can be a challenge to drive smoothly even with practice. Frustratingly, it’s not consistent. Sometimes you start the car and it works great; other times it’s too aggressive.

Transitions between acceleration and braking are about the only thing that’ll make you uncomfortable. The ride quality is very good, handily absorbing both big bumps and small cracks in the pavement. It’s one of our favorite facets of the car and a big improvement over our long-term Tesla Model Y.

Not only that, but it’s so much quieter inside, too. Fisker did a commendable job of isolating the cabin from outside noise with double-thickness acoustic glass and plenty of sound deadening. Outside noise, be it from wind or passing cars, is wonderfully muted, another big plus over the Tesla. The tires occasionally get noisy on rough pavement, but it’s a common issue with EV-specific tires.

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The Pretty Great Indoors

Not just quiet, the interior is a genuinely nice place to be (take note again, Tesla). While the colors all draw from the same corner of the palette, the use of texture, finish, and embossed details go a long way toward making it interesting and premium-feeling. Knowing the materials are almost entirely recycled, helping make the Ocean one of the most sustainable cars on the road—if Fisker’s marketing can be believed—also gives us warm and fuzzies. They look and feel rich, though we’ve noticed some of them—particularly around the door grab handles and on the dash—are getting marked up easily in normal usage.

The only bit that gets low marks from us is the steering wheel. Neither the look nor the feel of its plastic comes off nearly as premium as the rest of the interior (but the faux leather around the rim is nice enough). Not helping matters are the oversized buttons on the two spokes; they’re so big it’s easy to accidentally press them with your palms and change things in the middle of a turn. Neither are we fans of the touchscreen-controlled air vents, even if we do like the single dash-spanning trim piece suspended in front of them. This isn’t Fisker-specific, though; we find all setups like this to be needlessly complex and distracting.

We’re not all that much more enthusiastic about the “taco trays.” The driver’s tray folds out of the center armrest, where it takes up at least a third of the available space when stowed and when deployed only really works if you put the driver seat all the way back. Even then, it’s not super solid or particularly large. The passenger-side tray is also on the small side and partially overhung by the dash. We haven’t tried eating off either yet, and frankly we’d rather just have a regular glove box than these, plus hidden compartments under the front seats.

Between them, the massive center screen is generally good. We find the user experience pretty straightforward, but we wish it responded a little quicker. Its party trick, rotating 90 degrees so you can watch video when parked, is a bit gimmicky, and we haven’t put it into actual practice yet.

The row of hard buttons below the screen, which have a little screen of their own, are the right solution in the wrong place. We like having physical control for the volume, temperature, and fan, and we were delighted to find the little screen itself is also touch-sensitive, giving us more controls separate from the big screen. The only thing we don’t like about this setup is how low it hangs and how hard it makes it to get phones in and out of the wireless charging pads below.

Our favorite feature, though, is California mode. It was probably a lot of unnecessary work figuring out how to make both the rear window and the little side rear windows in the cargo area—“dog windows” in Fisker terms—roll down and do so at the same time as the door windows and the sunroof, but we love it. Not only does it make the Ocean feel almost like a convertible, or at least like a vintage SUV, but it also immediately releases all the hot air in the car after it’s been sitting in the sun. We use it all the time, even if it’s just for the first few minutes of the drive before rolling the windows back up to protect our hairdos (and the vehicle’s aerodynamics).

We also mostly like the sightlines out those windows, up or down. Fisker (the designer) was clever enough not to kick up the beltline until the trailing edge of the back doors, so the side windows front and rear are reasonably big and easy to see out when you’re looking over your shoulder in blind spots. The rear window is fairly pinched by the high beltline and sloping roof, but it’s offset by a selectable camera mode in the rearview mirror that has a high enough resolution. However, a loose mounting in the rear spoiler makes the camera image shake over bumps.

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Life in the Outback

Moving back, the rear seat is huge for a vehicle this size. You can see why a rideshare company wants to buy up all the unsold Oceans. There’s a ton of legroom and good headroom, plus on this model, power recliners deliver the ideal seat-back angle. Thankfully, they simply unlatch when you need to fold them down, so you don’t have to wait all day for them to power into place, but it would be nice if you could release them from the cargo area.

Our Extreme trim also comes with a touchscreen in the fold-down center armrest to control the climate and stereo volume, but it looks like an ancient LCD screen and responds even slower.

The trade-off in all that rear passenger space is a somewhat small cargo area. It’ll accommodate a few carry-on bags or maybe a pair of bigger suitcases, but you run out of space fairly quickly. There’s storage space under the cargo floor, as well, which is just deep enough for the portable EV charger we had to purchase because Fisker doesn’t offer one. Speaking of power, while we like having a 120-volt outlet in the car, we wish it weren’t in the trunk but instead somewhere we could reach from the front seats to plug in a laptop or other device.

That’s it for storage. Not only is there no frunk (front trunk), but the hood is also literally bolted shut.

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Not Bad at All

Purely as a vehicle to get us around town and even take the occasional road trip, the Fisker Ocean is pretty good. It has great range (360 miles by the EPA and 292 miles at a constant 70 mph per our Road-Trip Range Test), it’s quiet and comfortable, and the stereo’s even solid. The accelerator mapping and regenerative brake programming need more work, and we’d like some more storage space, but overall, we’re really enjoying just driving the Ocean. Now, the software-heavy features are another story, but that’s for another update.

For More On Our Long-Term Fisker Ocean Extreme:

●     Our Fisker Ocean Arrived For a Yearlong Test. Then Its Maker Went Bankrupt.

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