Bankrupt Fisker Unable To Port EV Data, Risking Multi-Million Dollar Fleet Deal (techcrunch.com) 25
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Fisker's Chapter 11 bankruptcy has hit a major snag, as the company buying the startup's remaining fleet of electric SUVs says it might not complete the purchase because of a surprising technical issue. The buyer, a New York-area leasing company called American Lease, says in a new filing that Fisker now believes there is no way to transfer the information connected to each SUV to a new server not owned by the bankrupt EV startup. Since American Lease needs that information to operate the vehicles after Fisker is dissolved, the leasing company has filed an emergency objection to the startup's liquidation plan. Fisker was expected to have that plan confirmed in bankruptcy court as early as this Wednesday.
American Lease has already handed over "tens of millions of dollars" after the purchase agreement of the 3,000-plus Ocean SUVs was approved in July. These funds have been crucial because Fisker was using them to pay for the bankruptcy process. Fisker needed that money to keep itself alive long enough to settle its debts and also prepare to liquidate what it says is around $1 billion in assets that were, until recently, under control of an Austrian subsidiary that was going through its own insolvency process. [...] American Lease says in its filing that Fisker first brought up the possibility that it wouldn't be able to transfer the information to a new server on Friday, October 4, at 8 p.m. ET. And it says that this week, Fisker informed American Lease that it won't be possible at all.
"[American Lease] cannot overstate the significance of this unwelcome news, conveyed to it only after it has paid [Fisker] tens of millions of dollars under the Purchase Agreement," the leasing company's lawyers write in the filing. "It is unclear at the present time what, if anything, Debtor representatives have known about the impossibility or impracticability of implementing Porting of the Purchased Vehicles, and when they learned or otherwise knew of that critical information." American Lease is asking to delay Wednesday's hearing and be allowed to perform "expedited and targeted discovery" of Fisker and its representatives to find out more about when Fisker learned of this problem.
American Lease has already handed over "tens of millions of dollars" after the purchase agreement of the 3,000-plus Ocean SUVs was approved in July. These funds have been crucial because Fisker was using them to pay for the bankruptcy process. Fisker needed that money to keep itself alive long enough to settle its debts and also prepare to liquidate what it says is around $1 billion in assets that were, until recently, under control of an Austrian subsidiary that was going through its own insolvency process. [...] American Lease says in its filing that Fisker first brought up the possibility that it wouldn't be able to transfer the information to a new server on Friday, October 4, at 8 p.m. ET. And it says that this week, Fisker informed American Lease that it won't be possible at all.
"[American Lease] cannot overstate the significance of this unwelcome news, conveyed to it only after it has paid [Fisker] tens of millions of dollars under the Purchase Agreement," the leasing company's lawyers write in the filing. "It is unclear at the present time what, if anything, Debtor representatives have known about the impossibility or impracticability of implementing Porting of the Purchased Vehicles, and when they learned or otherwise knew of that critical information." American Lease is asking to delay Wednesday's hearing and be allowed to perform "expedited and targeted discovery" of Fisker and its representatives to find out more about when Fisker learned of this problem.
Impossible (Score:1)
Re: Impossible (Score:3)
Legal issues about who customer data can be transferred to?
Re: (Score:2)
drm locks and no funds to pay for an transfer lice (Score:2)
drm locks and no funds to pay for an transfer license?
Re: Impossible (Score:2)
Oops with an EC2 bucket?
Re: Impossible (Score:2)
Fisker factory (Score:3)
It's a total shit show. https://jalopnik.com/fisker-le... [jalopnik.com]
It is not impossible (Score:3)
DIFFICULT, perhaps, but if the original data remains accessible on the original server, then it can be copied, exported, converted, remapped, whatever.
It's just bits, not magic.
Re: (Score:2)
Just guessing, but it's more likely a legal issue than technical.
Re: (Score:3)
Just guessing, but it's more likely a legal issue than technical.
Or an economic issue. We're literally talking about a bankrupt company. How many highly qualified IT staff that are capable of executing a migration of a fundamental system do you suppose they currently have on payroll? I will bet a Marsbar they went to some contractor and said "can you migrate this" and they got the answer back in return "WTF is this? Do you have someone who can explain it or show us documentation?" only to be told "Someone? You mean ... like a human? There's only lawyers left here bro."
One more time... (Score:2)
...the cloud is a trap. Run away!
It's fine to store backup data on the cloud, but the customer MUST own their data and have access to a local copy.
If the law does not already guarantee this, the law must be changed.
And there you have it (Score:2)
Not even a company can buy a physical product because that product is locked behind a digital wall.
Re: And there you have it (Score:2)
Mod parent up!
Technically or legally? (Score:5, Interesting)
One post speculated that American Lease isn't buying all of Fisker's technical assets, only the vehicles, meaning that they would end up getting more than they were paying for, including data on all of the other vehicles in Fisker's fleet, which presumably they don't want to inherit any responsibility for. Migrating only a subset of vehicles would require having a way to flash those specific vehicles with custom firmware, which would require pushing an update only to specific cars, which might require engineering effort involving staff that they no longer have.
If that's not the issue, then I'm wondering if the issue is technical — that they cannot transfer the data (e.g. because the servers were lost and there are no backups) — or legal (e.g. that the users' personal information cannot be transferred to a new company because of privacy laws, contractual terms, etc.). The former would be shocking, the latter not so much.
Worst comes to worst, one would reasonably assume the ability to simply hand over the physical servers as-is, along with root passwords, ownership of the domains, any signing keys, etc., and everything should keep working as it did before, just on a different network. But that only works if there aren't agreements in place or laws in place preventing such a transfer. And again, that largely depends on whether they're transferring control over everything (making this company the new Fisker, effectively) or only transferring the physical cars that the company is buying.
The other possibility is that this is some horror involving DNSSec and cars refusing to trust unsigned domains, or something similar, or needing to use a now-past-expiration signing key to sign some certificate, in which case CA rules may be problematic, or... basically at some point, I could easily see an extended period of company downtime resulting in a system becoming unserviceable without convincing a timestamping server to lie, at which point the only fix involves physically flashing the firmware in the main computer by unsoldering the flash parts, etc. I have no idea how far towards that sort of nightmare scenario they've gone.
So I'm going to be really curious to hear the "why" part of this story.
Re: (Score:2)
Having worked with 'good enough for today' software development shops, it is very much possible that the server is more than one server but rather a bunch of services across a bunch of poorly identified hosts where the 'discovery' mechanism is to hardcode ip addresses all over the place, potentially even in the source code itself. In a design like this you can't actually just move the server and start them in an other location, you would need to reproduce the networking environment, and if some of these har
Re: (Score:2)
It's certainly perplexing as to how it's so impossible with no explanation at all. And the article doesn't raise this point of no explanation either.
I hope (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:1)
"I can still buy their scissors. They're really good." - and DRM-free!
"Wouldn't be possible"? What, within a deadline? (Score:2)
Rich Rebuilds (Score:3)
Rich Rebuilds on Youtube bought a Fisker for $10,000, or roughly 90% off. It wouldn't charge. Turns out the charge port was in fail-safe, and once resetting the fail safe it worked. Thing is, to reset it from fail safe, you had to disassemble the entire charge port assembly, pull the port out, remove a solenoid, and manually reset it. This wouldn't be so terrible, but you can trip the fail-safe manually by pulling a wire loop in the driver side door frame. Pulling that wire loop means an hour and a half of work to reset the charge port.
Also, from the factory, it included multiple software bugs like aggressive torque steering due to a drive power imbalance, multiple false alerts showing up on the dash more-or-less constantly, and the car randomly rolling backwards when letting go of the brake on flat ground.
Firmware update (Score:2)
They need to update the firmware on the cars to point to a different server. They can probably just move the existing servers, but they would also need to acquire the Fisker domain (unless they hard-coded IP addresses, which would have been dumb but not inconceivable). Of course, the company probably no longer has any engineers who know how to update the firmware and point it at a new server, which is likely the key problem.
can an fake cell force DNS servers on DHCP? (Score:2)
can an fake cell force DNS servers on DHCP?
Just need to block cell use wifi and set your WIFI to use an DNS service with an host over ride?
Re: (Score:2)
According to Rich Rebuilds, the firmware can only be updated locally by a tech. It takes 5 hours and they can't jump versions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
5 hours is it usb 1.1? (Score:2)
5 hours is it usb 1.1?
"Cloud software" (Score:1)
This may be relevant:
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-08-24/fisker-bankruptcy-ocean-car-owners-shareholder