How Fisker Went From 300 EVs a Day to Chapter 11 in Six Months

Fisker filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2024. The filing listed estimated assets of between $500 million and $1 billion and liabilities of between $100 million and $500 million. Six months before that, the company was setting internal targets of 300 electric vehicle deliveries per day globally. It's worth going through what happened in between, because the details are more specific than most collapse narratives.

The Ocean SUV's Safety Problems

Fisker's first production vehicle, the Ocean SUV, attracted federal safety scrutiny almost as soon as deliveries began.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened its first investigation in January 2024, following 19 owner complaints covering brake loss, gear shifter failures, doors that wouldn't open from the inside, and two separate incidents of the vehicle's hood flying open at highway speed. By May 2024, four separate NHTSA investigations were open into the Ocean. The fourth covered eight complaints about inadvertent automatic emergency braking, where the system was activating in situations with no obstacles in the vehicle's path.

In between those investigations, more than 100 owners had reported sudden power loss incidents. Key fobs were locking drivers inside or outside the vehicle. Seat sensors weren't detecting the driver's presence. Fisker's public position throughout was that it had resolved "almost all" the issues through software updates. New complaints kept arriving.

The first formal recall came in June 2024, just before the bankruptcy filing, covering warning light display problems that put the Ocean out of compliance with federal safety standards.

The Sales Reality

Fisker's internal target for North America was between 100 and 200 Ocean deliveries per day. What the company was actually delivering through late 2023 into early 2024 was routinely one to two dozen. The broader goal of 300 daily deliveries globally was not in reach.

The math didn't work. By March 2024, Fisker had $121 million in cash on hand, of which $32 million was restricted or not immediately accessible. Its accounts payable balance had reached $182 million. The company acknowledged in a regulatory filing that there was "substantial doubt" about its ability to continue as a going concern, and announced a six-week production pause while it searched for a cash infusion.

The Funding Collapse

Fisker had been in negotiations with a large automaker - widely reported to be Nissan - over an investment and collaboration that could have provided a path forward. Those talks were terminated on March 22, without public explanation from either side.

The Nissan deal mattered beyond its face value. Keeping those negotiations active was one of the closing conditions for a separate $150 million convertible note. When the automaker walked, the convertible note fell through with it. The New York Stock Exchange suspended trading in Fisker's shares the same day, citing price levels it deemed "abnormally low" for a listed company.

From there: a 15% workforce reduction in February, more cuts in April, hundreds more in the final week of May. By the time the Chapter 11 filing was made in June, reports suggested around 150 people remained at a company that had employed far more.

What Was Happening Inside

TechCrunch reported that Fisker had run an internal audit from December 2023 through March 2024 after temporarily losing track of millions of dollars in customer payments. The issue stemmed from weak internal processes for tracking transactions, including down payments and full vehicle purchase prices. In some cases, Fisker had delivered vehicles without collecting any payment at all.

Fisker also stopped paying the engineering firm that had been developing two future models: the Pear, a planned low-cost EV, and the Alaska pickup truck. That firm accused Fisker of wrongfully retaining IP associated with both vehicles after the payments stopped.

What reporting on the internal culture described was a company that moved quickly through product development and capital raising without building the operational foundations those things eventually require - payment reconciliation, quality control at scale, and a functioning dealer infrastructure.

Where It Stands

Fisker is still in Chapter 11 as of this writing. The company has said it's maintaining "reduced operations" while running an asset sale process through the bankruptcy. The Ocean assets, future model IP, and the brand itself are available to buyers.

Whether a buyer materializes - and what they'd actually be acquiring if they did - isn't settled yet. The how of the collapse is.