Seeing the prices of a Fisker Ocean now might make picking one up pretty tempting. After all, it’s a new car with all kinds of cool design touches that retailed for upwards of $70,000 just a few months ago. How bad an experience can it really be? Well, YouTuber Rich Benoit of the RichRebuilds channel decided to find out when he was offered a 300-mile Ocean for just over $10,000, and things haven’t gone well.
The reason that this particular Ocean was so cheap is because it’s broken. Huge surprise, right? The original owner of the car traded it in on something from a car company with a future, and the dealership that got it let it sit too long, killing its 12-volt battery. Without that 12-volt battery, the car can’t go through its startup sequence and engage the high-voltage battery, which is also dead. It also can’t accept a charge for the high-voltage battery, so the car is essentially a brick.
The first step Rich and company undertake is to actually hook up the 12-volt battery as it arrived disconnected. Then they try and put it on a battery charger to see if the car would wake up, but it’s not until they find that the battery in the Fisker’s key fob is dead and replace it that they start to make any progress. Then someone inadvertently applied the parking brake and that’s where things go wrong.
Unlike most cars, the Ocean not only uses a parking brake on the rear wheels, but it also uses a parking pin in the front drive unit that also locks the front wheels. This makes it next to impossible to move the car into the garage to work on it. It takes hours of trial and error with turning the car on with the battery charger, getting the car into neutral, and then quickly removing the 12-volt battery terminals before the car has a chance to put its parking brake on automatically.
The moral of this story is that if people who own an actual EV-specific repair shop can barely get this technological terror in the garage, what chance do you have? Add to that the fact that even after countless software updates, the Ocean is still plagued with numerous bugs that will likely never get fixed short of some super-skilled owner figuring out how to patch the vehicle software themselves, and there’s a likely permanent shortage of repair parts.
So, no matter how cheap one of these Oceans is, it seems pretty probable that it’s going to drag you straight to the bottom without a lifeline.
