When Your Car Company Dies, Build Your Own

Here’s a thought experiment. You spend $60,000 on an SUV. The company that built it files for bankruptcy. The servers that keep your car running go dark. No more updates. No more diagnostics. No more key fobs that work reliably. Your vehicle — the second most expensive thing you’ll ever buy — starts becoming a paperweight.

What do you do?

If you’re one of the 11,000 people who bought a Fisker Ocean, the answer is: you build a car company in your garage.

Fisker Inc. crashed in June 2024. $1 billion in debt. 11,000 vehicles delivered, maybe 31,000 reservations that never materialized. The usual startup story, except for one thing: the cars didn’t stop existing just because the company did.

And here’s the part that should make every car manufacturer nervous. The Ocean was what Cory Doctorow called a “software-based car”. Every subsystem — brakes, battery, door locks, airbags — needed to phone home to Fisker’s cloud servers to operate properly. When those servers went silent, the cars didn’t just lose their Spotify. They lost core functionality.

This is the future of everything, and nobody seems to have noticed.

The Fisker Owners Association formed within months. Four thousand members. A nonprofit that operates like a cross between a car club, a reverse-engineering lab, and a guerrilla automaker. They hired tech experts to crack Fisker’s firmware. They taught each other how to flash ECUs over Zoom calls. They negotiated bulk parts purchases and drove the price of key fobs from $1,000 each down to pocket change.

In Europe, they set up a “Flying Doctors” program — technically skilled owners who travel to help stranded members keep their vehicles on the road. In the U.S., they secured parts pipelines through salvage channels and convinced insurers not to drop coverage for a car whose manufacturer had evaporated.

They did all of this because nobody else was going to do it.

The technical work is where this gets interesting.

On GitHub, a developer named MichaelOE reverse-engineered the My Fisker mobile API and built a Home Assistant integration under Apache 2.0 — 135 commits, 20 releases, and every cloud API value exposed as a sensor you can monitor from your living room. Separate teams have published CAN bus DBC files for the Ocean’s multiple controller networks — CCAN, PTCAN, Inverter CAN — all being mapped by volunteers with oscilloscopes and determination.

Majd Srour published a multi-part series on Medium walking through the reverse-engineering process step by step. Not gatekeeping. Not selling a service. Just documenting how he pried open his own car because the alternative was watching it die.

This is the open-source ethos applied to a $50,000 piece of machinery with airbags and brake lines. It’s terrifying and beautiful in equal measure.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth that the Fisker story exposes: every modern car is a Fisker Ocean waiting to happen.

We’ve been sold a narrative where software-defined vehicles are a feature. They’re not. They’re a dependency. Right now, Teslas rely on mobile app connectivity. Rivians phone home constantly. Every automaker with an OTA update pipeline has built a single point of failure into your driveway. If any of them goes under — and in a market where most EV startups are burning cash, “any” is doing a lot of work — you don’t just lose the infotainment screen. You might lose the car.

Vitalik Buterin said it best in July 2024: “We really need much more open source in the auto industry. Really sad that ‘if the manufacturer disappears, the car is useless now’ has seemingly so quickly become a default.”

He was right. But the Fisker owners did something about it while the rest of us were still nodding along.

The Fisker story isn’t about a car company. It’s about what happens when people refuse to accept that a product they own can be remotely bricked by corporate failure. It’s about taking the wrench into your own hands because the mechanic’s closed permanently.

The FOA didn’t ask permission. They didn’t wait for regulation. They didn’t lobby for right-to-repair laws to save them. They opened the hood and figured it out.

That’s not a car company. That’s a workshop.

And it’s the only kind of company that actually builds things that last.

Sources: Electrek, Cory Doctorow, FOA on Auto Connected Car News, Vitalik Buterin