What could make it impossible in this day and age? Lost admin passwords?

It's a total shit show. [1]https://jalopnik.com/fisker-le... [jalopnik.com]

[1] https://jalopnik.com/fisker-left-abandoned-headquarters-in-complete-disarra-1851666905

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.

...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.

Not even a company can buy a physical product because that product is locked behind a digital wall.

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.

I can still buy their scissors. They're really good.

How much data are we talking about, and what's the problem?

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.

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.

This may be relevant:

> The plan also calls for the owners association to have a voice in the sale of Fisker’s intellectual property, which includes the designs and computer code that were necessary to build and operate the vehicles. The owners need long-term access to Fisker’s “cloud software,” which is crucial for sending over-the-air updates to the vehicle software that controls the Ocean.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-08-24/fisker-bankruptcy-ocean-car-owners-shareholder