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In October On the evening of 2024, a gardener named Sven Hodne was driving home from his vacation on a windswept coastal road in southwestern Norway when his electric car started behaving strangely. Yellow and red warnings lit up her screen. An alarm went off. The car lost power. Houdini barely managed to get off the road and into a bus stop, next to a cemetery and a church, before the car stopped. He was lonely.
His phone battery was low, and Hodne quickly found an online towing service and called. He was told it would take about an hour to wait. He went out to stretch his legs, but it was dark and raining, and in the mid-forties; He got back into the car and closed the door behind him. Then everything went black. The car’s screens and lights were turned off. The heater and fan died. Even more disturbing was that he heard the car doors locking shut. The windows wouldn’t budge. When the glass started to fog up, he panicked.
“What if we run out of oxygen?” He remembers thinking. He was also concerned that the tow operator would have no idea how to free him from his wrecked electric vehicle, the Mariana Blue Fisker Ocean. Like any modern car, it was powered by proprietary software. But its maker, Fisker, It had declared bankruptcy four months ago. He couldn’t find good information – or even a phone number – online. Who can contact now?
Hodne went to Facebook and found a group called Fisker Owners Association. “I’m locked inside my car, waiting for rescue. Everything is black on the screens. Keys not working. Restart not working. Nothing. Totally dead,” he wrote. Although Houdini didn’t know it, he had just set off a global chain reaction that rippled through a small but dedicated community of slightly weird electric car enthusiasts.
In upstate New York, one of the group’s administrators saw this post. Since Fisker’s bankruptcy, Christian Fleming has been doing everything he can to keep the ocean on the road. (Not to mention that his surroundings had difficulty climbing the steep dirt road to his house.) Fleming reached out to one of his close contacts in Europe, and he thought he knew someone who could help. This person sent a message to Hodne: Contact Jens Guthe in NorwayIt included a number.
In his home office in Oslo, Jens Guthe received the call from an unknown number. He previously had a 30-year banking career that took him all over the world. But Goethe’s last few months were also consumed by the ocean, as he spent hours helping desperate owners search for increasingly hard-to-find parts for their cars. Hodne had enough phone battery to explain the situation and connect Guthe to the tow driver who had now arrived. Goethe explained not only how to operate the battery, but also the precise movements needed to open the hood hinge, a technology that, Goethe says, appears to be built into only one other car, an Audi built in the 1990s.
For weeks afterward, Ocean owners from around the world who saw his post sent him messages: Did he survive the accident okay? Howden moved, spending the $600 annual fee to join the Fisker Owners Association with Fleming, Guthe and about 4,000 other ocean owners.
What he found was not so much an amateur car club as a volunteer-run multinational car company in the making. As many of its owners saw, Fisker built a defective vehicle Then he abandoned them when they needed help. If a company can’t take advantage of years of software updates and parts, it will push the code and source the parts itself. It was more than just an electric car, a hobby, or even a community. It was about taking back control of an economy run by rent-seeking tech companies that will drive up prices until the day they drop you.