Benzinga - by Anan Ashraf, Benzinga Editor.
Certain former employees of beleaguered EV maker Fisker Inc. (OTC:FSRN) are reportedly of the opinion the company was not ready to sell cars in the first place.
What Happened: Fisker did not plan for a stockpile of car parts in the U.S. in case of repairs, InsideEVs reported, citing unnamed former Fisker employees. The company instead relied on sourcing components from disassembled cars, they said.
"It became very clear to anybody looking that this was a company not ready for prime time—to sell a product, to have any kind of customer service," a former employee told the news site.
Fisker only bought enough parts for production and not repairs. So when Ocean customers started coming back with requests for repairs and part replacement, the company took it from the company’s production factory in Austria and shipped it to the U.S., three sources told the platform, making supply unpredictable.
"No plan was ever made for service parts, no matter how much we asked," one source told InsideEVs. "By September, things were breaking and we had nothing to fix [them] with."
Components were also taken from donor cars to meet the scarcity, the report said, while adding that parts were occasionally transported from Austria to the U.S. in employees’ personal luggage to expedite the process.
Fisker’s leadership allegedly reasoned the lack of spare parts saying Ocean would be well-built enough to rarely need replacement parts. "They truly thought they built the perfect car," a former employee said.
Fisker, however, has denied these claims, the report noted. The company did not immediately respond to Benzinga‘s request for comment.
Fisker Closing-In On Bankruptcy: California-based Fisker in February warned it may not have enough funds to operate over the year. The company’s shares were delisted from the New York Stock Exchange the following month owing to low share prices and potential investment talks with a major automaker collapsed, leaving Fisker's financial future uncertain.
In April, the company said in a filing that it expects to seek protection under bankruptcy laws within 30 days if unable to receive waivers from its debt holders or raise enough capital to settle its dues. The company had unrestricted cash and cash equivalent of just $53.9 million as of April 16.
In May, U.S. auto safety regulator National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a probe into 6,813 model year 2023 Ocean SUVs over unintended activation of its automatic emergency braking system that increases the risks of a crash.
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