evening in 2024, a gardener named Svein Hodne was driving home from vacation on a wind-buffeted coastal road in southwest Norway when his electric car began behaving strangely. Yellow and red warnings lit up its display. An alarm went off. The car lost power. Hodne barely managed to turn off the road and into a bus stop, right next to a graveyard and a church, before the car came to a stop. He was alone.
His phone battery running low, Hodne quickly found a tow service online and called. He was told it would be about an hour wait. He went outside to stretch his legs, but it was dark, rainy, and in the mid-forties; he got back inside the car and closed the door behind him. Then everything went black. The car’s screens and lights turned off. The heater and fan died. Most disconcerting, he heard the car doors lock shut. The windows wouldn’t budge. As the glass started fogging up with condensation, he panicked.
“What if I run out of oxygen?” he remembered thinking. He worried, too, that the tow operator would have no clue how to free him from his bricked EV, a Mariana blue Fisker Ocean. Like any modern car, it was powered by proprietary software. But its maker, Fisker, had declared bankruptcy four months earlier, and he couldn’t find good information—or even a phone number—online. Who could he contact now?
Hodne went on Facebook and found a group called Fisker Owners Association. He posted: “I’m locked inside my car, waiting for rescue. Everything is black on the screens. Keys don’t work. Restart doesn’t work. NOTHING. Totally dead.” Though Hodne didn’t know it, he’d just set off a global chain reaction that rippled through a small but dedicated community of slightly peculiar electric vehicle fans.
In upstate New York, a group administrator saw the post. Since the Fisker bankruptcy, Cristian Fleming was doing everything he could to keep the Ocean on the road. (Never mind that his own Ocean had trouble getting up the steep dirt path to his home.) Fleming reached out to a close contact in Europe he thought would know someone who could help. That person sent Hodne a message: Call Jens Guthe in Norway, and included a number.
In his Oslo home office, Jens Guthe picked up the call from an unknown number. He’d previously had a 30-year banking career that took him all over the world. But Guthe’s last few months had been eaten by the Ocean, too, as he had spent hours helping desperate owners hunt down increasingly hard-to-find parts for their cars. Hodne had just enough phone battery to explain the situation and connect Guthe with the tow driver, who had by now arrived. Guthe explained not only how to spark the battery but also the precise movements needed to open the Ocean’s hood hinge, a technique, says Guthe, that seems built into only one other car, an Audi manufactured in the ’90s.
For weeks afterward, Ocean owners from around the world who had seen his post sent him messages: Had he made it out alright? Moved, Hodne spent the $600 yearly fee to join the Fisker Owners Association with Fleming, Guthe, and some 4,000 other Ocean owners.
What he found was less an amateur car club than a volunteer-run multinational automotive company in the making. As many owners saw it, Fisker had built a flawed vehicle and then abandoned them when they needed help. If the company wouldn’t be making good on years of software updates and replacement parts, then they would push the code and source the parts themselves. This was about more than an electric car, or a hobby, or even a community. It was about taking back control of an economy run by rent-seeking tech companies that will jack up prices until the day they drop you.
