In today’s blog, I will discuss a brand that was founded in 2016 with lofty ambitions. However, a single review from a YouTuber destroyed their reputation and seemingly brought the company to its knees. I am talking about Fisker, a company that was an aspiring American EV brand. Their goal was to rival Tesla. That hasn’t worked out well for them. This is how Marques Brownlee described their car, “I think it’s just the worst I have ever tested.” And after this one review, the Fisker company began to collapse. The company also went bankrupt. Is it possible for a YouTuber to kill a billion-dollar company? That’s what I am going to write about.
Ambition vs. Reality: The Failure of the “Tesla Killer”
But just what exactly is Fisker? How did we get here in the first place? It was founded in 2016 by Henrik Fisker. Remember that name, because it will become very important later in the blog. The company was extremely ambitious. In 2017, they announced patents for a new “solid state battery” technology, and made big claims at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show. They stated this at the show, “We believe solid-state batteries are the future for electric vehicles”. This attracted a lot of attention, and a lot of money. They even got backing from the heavy machinery giant Caterpillar to advance the technology.
Then, Fisker unveiled its first car. The Fisker EMotion. A luxury EV car with the new solid-state battery technology. It had 400 miles per charge, had butterfly doors, would cost $129,000, and was called the “Tesla Killer” … by Fisker, at least. It could have been a Tesla killer for all we know if it had actually come out. Yeah, the EMotion never actually made it to market. Not only that, but despite all the hype, Fisker quietly abandoned solid-state battery technology.
Henrik said that “It’s the kind of technology where, when you feel like you’re 90 percent there, you’re almost there, until you realize the last 10 percent is much more difficult than the first 90.” Since the EMotion was tied to that, it caused quite a few production problems. But I think there’s another reason they dropped the car.
Luxury sports cars are expensive and sound profitable, but it’s not where the money is, especially in EVs. The money is in the SUVs. The big, expensive, family vehicles. So Fisker turned their attention elsewhere and eventually revealed a car they would bring to market.
The Affordable Ocean: Pricing Strategy and Feature Hype:
The Fisker Ocean. A stylish SUV, which used the traditional lithium-ion battery. Fisker wanted to disrupt the industry with a cheaper yet stylish EV. The Ocean SUV would cost as little as $37,500. Still not a cheap car by any means, but for EVs, that’s cheap. Ford’s EV SUV, the Mustang Mach-E, started at around $42,000, and GM’s Chevy Blazer would be priced at about $45,000. Fisker was trying to bring down the price and make EVs more affordable. It would even offer a cheaper EV called the Fisker Pear, priced at $29,900, making it one of the cheapest EVs in the world.
Founder Henrik Fisker said, “We created this vehicle with the idea that young people living in the world’s big cities need innovative, versatile, and affordable mobility.” But there was something else. According to Fisker, their cars would be technological marvels. The Fisker Ocean was packed. It had a solar roof, meaning it would charge and increase the car’s range when parked. It had a giant 17-inch touchscreen that could rotate. The wheels and plastic inside the car were made with eco-friendly, recycled materials. Then people got the car, and that’s when things began to go wrong.
The Viral Verdict: MKBHD’s “Worst Car I’ve Ever Reviewed”
As I told you at the start of this blog, it all began with a simple YouTube video. On February 17th, 2024, Marques Brownlee dropped a video on his car review channel “Auto Focus”. The title? “This is the Worst Car I’ve Ever Reviewed”. To be honest, the review started out with a lot of praise. But then, Marques began to show the car’s “quirks”. And there were a lot of them. Keep in mind, the Fisker Ocean was released to the US market in June 2023, about 8 months before this review.
Yet, this wasn’t even the worst of it. It’s important to note that there were many other reviews of the Fisker Ocean, and most highlighted similar issues. Unfortunately… Fisker didn’t have a long time.
Fisker’s Failed Software Damage Control:
You see, Marques tried to get a car directly from Fisker, but they delayed again and again. Eventually, fed up with waiting for a vehicle to review, he borrowed one from a car dealer. But Fisker wasn’t thrilled about this. Of course, Marques was going to review the car and how he received it. Which, keep in mind, is the car that the public had been using for about 8 months. Marques likely expected to release the video, return the Fisker Ocean, and be done with it. He even ended the video by saying he was rooting for Fisker, because competition is good.
But this video set off a long line of dominoes. Almost immediately, things began to unfold. Tension: The review quickly gained traction and, in just 10 days, had 4 million views. It quickly became the most viewed video on Auto Focus and to this day, is still in the number one spot. Discussion about Fisker quickly spiked online. Naturally, the company caught wind of this.
A senior engineer at Fisker reached out to the dealership to figure out why the company was in flames. Fisker was in damage control, and unfortunately, they let something slip. All of this was bad, but it was made even worse by a crucial flaw. As it turns out, Fisker couldn’t update their vehicles over the cloud. If you want a software update, you have to manually take it to a dealership or have a technician come out to you personally. Imagine if Tesla did that.
Despite Henrik Fisker talking about having the most modern technology and faster development, it had many, many issues. While less efficient and costly, it’s safe to say there’s a reason other cars take so long to get to market. It’s so they don’t have issues like these. In just a few weeks, Fisker’s share price dropped by 50%. Things were bad. But there was hope.
With the new 2.0 update, Fisker asked Marques to do another review. Supposedly, this would fix most of the problems he had. He agreed. But, as we know from the phone call, 2.0 wouldn’t bring Fisker’s salvation. There were some improvements and fixes, to be sure. But many of the core problems were still there. But even with these improvements, it didn’t really matter.
Fisker was losing money fast. Too fast. There was no coming back. Fisker filed for bankruptcy on June 18th, 2024. Less than three months after the second review dropped. This prompted even more discussion. People accused Marques of killing Fisker, or how much power influencers and reviewers have today.
Bankruptcy Despite a Second Chance:
He even released his own video discussing the phenomenon. But, something doesn’t add up. Tesla’s first car wasn’t good either. The roadster was littered with problems and criticized everywhere. Online and even on TV. Even today, most would agree that Tesla lacked the refined experience that you find on a Porsche or a Mercedes for the same price. Yet they became the most dominant player in the EV industry.
So how did Tesla survive, and Fisker die? Well, there’s a lot more to this story, and a lot more to Fisker.
The Invisible Financial Abyss:
Take a look at Fisker’s share price history. I have posted an image to show you guys in this blog, where exactly the stock price of Fisker tanked to 50% after the video of Marques Brownlee.
This tells us something crucial. Fisker was in trouble long before Marques Brownlee ever got to it. In 2023, Fisker reported a net loss of $463 million. They quickly began cutting costs, including 15% of the workforce. They were also desperate for more funding. In their 2023 financial report, Fisker stated that “If we are not successful in obtaining any of these additional incentives and we are unable to find alternative sources of funding to meet our planned capital needs, our business and prospects could be materially adversely affected.” Corporate lingo for “we’re at death’s door”.
Fisker halted its EV production and looked for salvation. In March 2024, just after Marques Brownlee’s review dropped, Fisker was in close talks with Nissan for more investment and partnership. They would supposedly invest $400 million. This would be their lifeline. But, just a few weeks later, the deal fell through. Maybe Nissan saw Marques’ review?
The Tangle of Missing Cash and Lawsuits:
At this time, their stock was delisted from the NYSE. This does not even mention the three separate times that Fisker was investigated for faulty doors on the Ocean, which just wouldn’t open, causing severe safety concerns. But what about the Fisker Pear? The cheap model that would make EVs affordable for everyone?
Well… like their solid-state batteries, it was a big claim, but $30,000 was a promise that went nowhere, due to their financial troubles. There was also something weird going on behind the scenes. Fisker couldn’t figure out where its cash went. That’s right. Millions of dollars in customer payments were allegedly gone.
Reportedly, there was some internal “payment crisis.” One past employee said, “Checks were not cashed on time or just lost altogether. We were often scrambling to find checks, credit card receipts, and any wired funds a few months after a vehicle was sold.”
Then, an external audit was conducted, or at least attempted. The giant consultancy firm PwC couldn’t complete it. Because all the documents were missing or incomplete. The firm kept asking Fisker for more information and documents, but they couldn’t provide them. “Paperwork being collected wasn’t always being collected in full, or sent to the same places,” said another employee.
CEO Henrik Fisker said that “2023 was a challenging year for Fisker, including delays with suppliers and other issues that prevented us from delivering the Ocean SUV as quickly as we had expected,” But there’s something that he failed to mention. Many of these delays and supplier issues were self-inflicted. By that I mean, they had failed them.
For example, a customer service company sued Fisker, saying they owed them over $660,000. They were in the middle of 30 lawsuits for failed payments, including an engineering firm that helped develop their vehicles. Supposedly, they owed them $13 million. There were many more millions they owned on top of that, and they had stopped paying some suppliers as far back as August 2023.
But that brings us to a key question. How did any of this happen?
A History of Catastrophic Leadership:
As it turns out, this is Henrik Fisker’s second attempt at this. Fisker Inc. was originally an entirely separate company called Fisker Automotive. The original company was founded back in 2007 and produced luxury plug-in hybrids. It even had Leonardo DiCaprio as an investor. But sure enough, Fisker Automotive also had issues, like battery failures and financial mismanagement.
The crazy part is that Fisker Automotive also went bankrupt way back in 2013. Its assets were bought by a Chinese investor who rebranded the company as “Karma Automotive”.
Then, Henrik formed Fisker Inc. in 2016, and the cycle repeated. That’s right, Henrik Fisker has gone bankrupt twice with two separate EV companies under his own name. Fisker was in bad shape long before Marques Brownlee got to them. There were even more wild issues going on that I didn’t have time to cover, like them “pinching” spare parts from a supplier.
He accelerated their downfall for sure, but if a startup loses half a billion dollars and can’t figure out where its revenue went, and can’t pay its suppliers… It’s probably gonna die anyway. Maybe Marques prevented that Nissan lifeline. Who knows.
The Opinion You Were Waiting For:
In my opinion, Marques isn’t the reason Fisker died… but he did take them out back and finish them off. When I watched his review for the first time, the thing that stood out to me was not the jokes or the edits. It was how many of the problems he pointed out were basic things any serious car company should have fixed long before a customer ever touched the vehicle. That told me everything I needed to know.
To be honest, I have seen this pattern before, not with cars, but with businesses in general. Whenever a company is messy on the inside, it eventually leaks out on the outside. You can hide it for a while, you can push marketing, you can talk big, but eventually someone notices. Sometimes it is a customer, sometimes an employee, and in Fisker’s case, it just happened to be a YouTube reviewer with a huge audience.
If Fisker was financially strong and internally organized, that review would have been a bruise, not a bullet. But they were already laying off people, missing payments, losing paperwork, and praying for a rescue deal. A company in that position cannot even handle a small hit, let alone a viral video calling their first real product the worst car someone had driven.
So no, I don’t blame Marques. I blame the leadership that did not learn from their first failure. I blame the promises that were made too quickly. I blame the shortcuts that eventually showed up in the final product. A review cannot destroy a healthy company. It can only expose a weak one.
And in Fisker’s case, that is exactly what happened.
Conclusion:
Fisker did not collapse because of a single YouTube video. Their downfall was years in the making, built on missed deadlines, unfulfilled promises, financial chaos, and leadership that repeated old mistakes. Marques Brownlee did not break the company, he simply revealed issues that were already baked into the product and the business. A strong company would have survived criticism. A fragile one could not. Fisker was already falling, the review only made everyone notice.
FAQs:
1. Did Marques Brownlee actually cause Fisker to go bankrupt?
No. His review increased public attention on the problems, but Fisker was already struggling with financial losses, unpaid suppliers, recalls, and missing documentation.
2. Why did Fisker fail when other early EV companies survived?
Companies like Tesla survived because they managed money better, refined their technology over time, and eventually delivered a consistent product. Fisker suffered from repeated internal failures and poor management.
3. What was the biggest issue with the Fisker Ocean?
Many issues were software-related, and the inability to update the car remotely made it difficult to fix problems efficiently.
4. What happened to the solid-state battery technology Fisker promoted?
The company abandoned the technology quietly after realizing that the final stage of development was far more difficult than expected.
5. Did Fisker ever actually deliver the Pear, their affordable EV?
No. The Pear never reached production, mostly because Fisker ran out of money and resources long before development could be completed.
6. Has Henrik Fisker been involved in failed EV companies before?
Yes. His earlier company, Fisker Automotive, also went bankrupt in 2013 and was later renamed by its new owners.
