Fisker Group, the electric vehicle startup founded by famed designer Henrik Fisker, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the culmination of months of problems with its Ocean SUV, including recalls and dozens of lemon law lawsuits.
The California-based company, which filed for bankruptcy in Delaware District Court, had been exploring a deal with another automaker as a last resort to save its business. It estimated its assets at between $500 million and $1 billion and its liabilities at between $100 million and $500 million, according to the filing.
Fisker reported between 200 and 999 creditors, including SAP, Adobe, Salesforce and Ansys, in court documents filed late Monday. The filing comes just a year after Fisker delivered its all-electric Ocean SUV to a customer.
The highly hyped EV has had a troubled start, with customers reporting a variety of software and mechanical issues shortly after taking delivery of their vehicles. Internally, the company struggled to set up adequate customer service and maintenance efforts, and even had trouble tracking funding, as TechCrunch previously reported.
Fisker, which used contract manufacturer Magna, ended up delivering just a few thousand vehicles worldwide. Henrik Fisker said the plan when the company went public in a special acquisition merger in 2020 was to leverage Magna's vehicle manufacturing technology to create an Apple-Foxconn-style relationship. The EV startup even negotiated with Foxconn with a plan to build cheaper compact EVs, but that deal ultimately fell apart.
Fisker has tried to conserve cash in recent months through several job cuts and other cost-cutting measures. It also changed its business model. Earlier this year, Fisker stopped selling directly to customers (a system popularized by Tesla) and tried to partner with existing dealers. Ultimately, those efforts weren't enough to save the company from bankruptcy.
This is the second Henrik Fisker auto company bearing his name to file for bankruptcy. His first, Fisker Automotive, was founded in 2007 and filed for bankruptcy in 2013. The company similarly produced a vehicle on the road, a hybrid-electric sports car, but ran into quality issues and other external factors that proved fatal. (Fisker Automotive's assets were bought out of bankruptcy and acquired by current EV startup Karma.)