Fisker, after the , . For CEO Henrik Fisker, founder of both and , it’s a tale as old as time — spin up a car company, make a few copies of one car, and then crash and burn in spectacular fashion. A , though, starts to connect the dots on why this keeps happening to Fisker’s companies: The man himself.
TechCrunch spoke to workers from Fisker Inc. — that’s the Fisker that does the Ocean, not the Fisker that did the Karma — about the design, engineering, release, and support processes for the Ocean. In each field, employees reported chaos and arbitrary decision making that stemmed straight from the top: Henrik Fisker and Geeta Gupta-Fisker, the husband and wife team running the show.
From : A year before Henrik Fisker handed over the first 22 Ocean SUVs in the U.S., the founder and CEO made an unusual change in the auto industry: he wanted wheel spacers installed on the vehicles.
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The decision eventually rocked Fisker’s engineering team. The lead chassis engineer at the time, Brent Demers, sent an email in March 2023 to a group that included the VP of engineering, William Stinnett, saying Fisker’s Design and Studio team was “acting alone” installing the spacers “without proper validation and regard for previous engineering recommendations,” according to a copy viewed by TechCrunch. Demers asked to “introduce the spacers into the project by means of proper channels” instead.
If there’s one thing the automotive world needs, it’s more arbitrary d.
