27
votes
Fisker's EV prices slashed by up to $24,000, Tesla freezes them as trades
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Authors
- Stephen Edelstein, John Voelcker, Bengt Halvorson, Joel Feder
- Published
- Mar 29 2024
- Word count
- 296 words
Last week Fisker's talks with another car company came to a bad end. The company's stock price is less than $0.25 and it's looking like the company is burning through the last of its cash and will go into default.
Edmunds says flat out: Do Not Buy a New Fisker Ocean, even at the new prices (which really are available right now on the Fisker website). Interestingly, it's the fully-featured models with a 360 mile (580km) range that have the biggest price discounts.
Ocean owners who bought the vehicle at full price aren't just having buyer's remorse, they're worried that the company won't last long enough (long, but worthwhile read) to deliver on the features promised when the car was purchased, some of which depend on OTA updates. Some owners don't even have paperwork showing proof of sale/ownership!!
I think it's dumb to preorder when games promise features. It's insane to do it with a car.
You aren't the only one. I'm at a loss as to why someone, anyone, is willing to be a beta tester for a 5-6 figure appliance. This era of incomplete consumer products really needs to end.
You wouldn't download a car
Especially 6 months after buying it
At a certain price point I suppose a car is a car. Even if some of the bells and whistles don't work, $37k for what's supposed to be high-end EV is a fantastic deal. Even $25k for a low-end EV is almost unheard of outside of compact EVs like the Leaf. These prices would also explain why I've suddenly seen a Fisker EV in my area for the first time. I could easily see the logic stopping here for a lot of people, making them think it's a good deal.
The lack of future updates and dealer service is definitely...concerning from a safety and security standpoint. But what makes this a complete non-starter to me is really just the upcoming lack of parts. Tesla's and other smaller EV makers are already notoriously expensive to fix, even for minor fender benders. If Fisker were to go full chapter 7, whatever parts inventory they maintain now is probably going to become even more fractious and hard to source. People might just be stuck with any minor damage caused in traffic, and end up with a totaled car if it requires actual repairs. I have to guess that this will also go into the risk assessment for an auto-insurer, though it's hard to say how much it would affect the total insurance cost.
37k for a high end EV that the company is about to go out of business is insane. That means you are buying a car that soon won't have support, and we aren't even talking about newer problems like updating software but even finding parts for it if something breaks (or you crash into something and it needs to be repaired). It hasn't sold well so the pool of cars to pull parts from will be small and the company won't be around to make parts.
Yeah... that's the kind of car you buy at prices that you are fine with it just being a disposable car when it breaks. I don't want to pay 37k for a disposable car. Fisker is really fucked at this point cause it's obvious they are most likely going to die out, and as I pointed out, anyone with sense isn't going to buy a car from a company that is about to disappear and of course that is the vicious cycle that will help them go under.
My 20 year old toyota celica is less disposable than that car (and while the 7th gen celica didn't sell that great it's only body parts that are harder to find. And I bet I see more celicas every day of that generation than I do fiskers, not sure I've seen any fiskers irl honestly. But as for engine when parts wear out, it has the same engine as the corolla which you can find everywhere. I bet it wouldn't be too expensive to buy a whole "new" engine for it even. Though at this point probably worth more than the car is worth. Though it would be cheaper for me to do then buying a new car to replace it if I had to).
Not even talking about Fisker specifically here ... I just keep seeing posts about green/renewable vehicles, from cars all the way down to skateboards and scooters ... where the post title is something like "Ultragreen Travel Thing now $1200 off" ... and I get interested for a half-second, until I realize no, that's not the price, that's just the markdown ... and I am barely willing to consider paying the markdown price, let alone the actual price.
$24,000 for a car is expensive. It just is. $37,000 (the discounted price) is too much money for a car. $60k+ (I guess the original price range) is way, way, way too much money for a car.
Stop building cars that do 0-100 in half a second and have built-in coffee makers and jacuzzis and build cars that people can afford.
And get off my lawn.
</rant>There’s a need for electric Civics, Mirages, Fits, and Yarises (Yarii?) — simple, practical, affordable — but automakers aren’t the least bit interested in making them.
While I can see the argument for starting at the high end and working down, traditional automakers missed that boat when they decided to not do that alongside Tesla a decade ago. The appetite for high end EVs has been sated for a while, it’s time to come down now.
I'm out of date, but I thought the Nissan Leaf was supposed to be the affordable one? Looks like it's about the same price as a Prius, around $28k.
But that's looking at new models. Realistically, an affordable car is a used car.
BYD is apparently making cheap electric cars, but it remains to be seen how well they do outside China. They are selling them in some European countries.
The thing about the Leaf is that it’s built on what’s now ancient battery and charging tech and has design problems that make it compare badly to practically any other EV.
Picking up old used models for dirt cheap ($5k-$8k) isn’t too bad if the limited range of those models (~70mi max) isn’t a problem for that your usage, but bought new they don’t make any sense. For the price of a new Leaf ($28k) there’s many much better options, both used and new.
I honestly cannot believe that people keep giving Henrik Fisker money. Dude can make some good looking cars. I like most of what he has done including the look of most of the Fisker EVs. But the man clearly cannot run a successful car company. Oh well, I guess he could always pack it up and start fresh for the third time.
He almost got it right this time! Maybe he'll have a real success with two more tries if we all dig deep and preorder as soon as we can!
I mean, someone out there keeps thinking it is a good idea to give this man money so I wouldn't be surprised.
I just hope he gets more creative with the name instead of just Fisker.
My ideas:
Fisker Real Deal
Fisker 2.0
H Fisker
Fisker No Bankruptcy
I really thought this time around they would've partnered with Geely/Volvo for a platform. The way that Geely's Polestar has. Polestar seems to be trying to take the design cues that Fisker didn't, but Fisker's look is much closer to Volvo's, interior and exterior.
As far as the money aspect, a lot of these people seem to make a game of finding venture capital and building themselves up. It's an amazing ability, really. All of the schmoozing and the glad-handing that's turned into fairly large amounts of capital. If only they'd use it for something useful like supporting an end to human trafficking, or building a desalinization plant.
Yeah the amount of VC money that has been burned on EV startups is amazing. Sure, Tesla did it and all it took was a crazy CEO willing to dump millions of his own money into the company while also working his employees to the bone in the name of "the mission." Now everyone wants to make Tesla money while conveniently forgetting how impossible it is to start a successful car company not named Tesla.
How about:
Fisker Part Deux
Fisk and Fiskerer
Fiskers
Fisker For Women
Ooo, I like Fisker Part Deux.
Pretty sure this is the car MKBHD said was the worst car he’d ever reviewed. And then a company rep called up the person who lent him the car and had that weird phone call
That video was recommended to me the other day so I watched it. It seems like the Ocean definitely had a bunch of problems and lack of features enabled by software prior to the 2.0 update. MKBHD has a new video out as of today (I watched it earlier) and he reviews a different spec'd Ocean with the OS 2.0. It adds a number of things that people had requested/expected, though falls short on fixing everything.
On the note of MKBHD, keep in mind that he hasn't reviewed that many cars in general and his knowledge of the vehicles he reviews seems to fall a little short compared to other YT reviewers and "car people." There are much worse cars than the Ocean, but the Ocean does fall short of what the company hoped to deliver and falls shorter still on what customers deserved to receive.