Fisker EVs have lost software connectivity following the breakdown of a partnership between a group of Fisker fans and a car rental company that dates back to Fisker’s June 2024 bankruptcy.
The Fisker Owner’s Association (FOA) is a band of passionate owners who wanted to keep their cars running. American Lease is a New York City-based commercial rental firm whose customers include Lyft and Uber drivers; it purchased 3,300 Fisker EVs at a discount after the bankruptcy.
Their partnership started as a unique, renegade effort to avoid turning these $70,000 EVs into bricks. (Fisker delivered roughly 7,500 vehicles globally between 2023 and 2024.) But less than a year later, both say the relationship is irrevocably broken, with American Lease cutting off Fisker drivers’ connectivity on May 15. It’s a cautionary tale that applies far beyond EVs, and is a risk all consumers run when purchasing software-connected products.
Fisker Ocean (Credit: Emily Forlini/PCMag)
Drivers can still use and charge their Fisker EVs, but they have lost access to premium connected services. Most concerningly, the cars cannot receive over-the-air (OTA) updates or remote diagnostics, which means no future bug fixes or comprehensive maintenance.
American Lease and the FOA are now independently working on rival connectivity plans, which they plan to present to Fisker drivers. American Lease encourages Fisker owners to reach out to its software provider Indigo at [email protected] for more information about a new customer subscription it’s prepping.
The FOA’s offering would be built by a crew of software engineers who have been learning about the vehicles since the bankruptcy.
We reviewed emails and spoke to both sides to get the backstory. At the center of the implosion is the lack of a written contract, a disastrous OTA update, and an ongoing payment dispute.
“This could be a seven-part Netflix mini series,” Josh Bleiberg, EVP of American Lease, tells us.
“This will be a movie one day,” FOA President Cristian Fleming said separately.
Software Complicates the Once-Exciting Partnership
The first few months after the bankruptcy were exciting for both parties, who felt like they were pioneering a new form of car ownership. Their first projects focused on American Lease’s ability to manufacture replacement parts, such as bumpers and windshields, which Fisker drivers would need, Sybil Yang of the FOA tells us.
Yang notes that Bleiberg “was generous” and helped pay for a few extra windshields, which they imported from Chinese manufacturers on three container ships.
“I thought this was a really cool project and it was nice to do something for a group that was screwed by a bankruptcy,” says Bleiberg. “If I’m going to do it I’m going to act in good faith.”
Fisker Ocean (Credit: picture alliance / Contributor / picture alliance via Getty Images)
The “inflection point,” as Fleming calls it, was in October 2024, when American Lease learned shortly before it closed the deal to acquire the extra inventory that it would not have access to Fisker software. To avoid buying a fleet of lemons, American Lease negotiated a $2.5 million licensing deal with Fisker’s bank, Heights Capital, to maintain access the vehicle software, which it also extended to privately owned Fisker EVs.
“American Lease went above and beyond to ensure we early adopters are well-supported through this service agreement, and we are all incredibly grateful,” FOA member Clint Bagley told us at the time. “We hope this will open the door for third-party improvements to the software and features in our vehicles, which we desperately need.”
The FOA would be responsible for the $2.5 million, repaying American Lease over five years in installments of $500,000; American Lease would then pass the funds to Heights Capital. In exchange, the FOA expected to get access the code base, diagnostic codes for maintenance, and other IP. That would make them the first coalition of drivers to have access to their vehicles’ software, a major step toward pioneering an owner-operated model.
The FOA would also have to reimburse American Lease for hefty bills to Amazon and Microsoft for their AWS and Azure computing platforms, respectively, and an internet connectivity plan from T-Mobile. The third and final payment American Lease expected was a $125,000 lump sum to Indigo for operating costs starting in January, which it says the FOA never negotiated or paid.
The FOA planned to pay all of this with member-provided funds. First, it took donations, and in December 2024 it implemented a dues program of around $600 per year, a number it landed on after conversations with Bleiberg, who approximated the operational costs.
The two agreed the FOA would make a push to get more members; those who enrolled would be the ones whose cars remained connected. The more members, the more people to share the load and keep the cars alive, Bleiberg says. The FOA says it didn’t work out that way.
‘A Deal on the Courthouse Steps’
The lack of a formal contract kicked off a series of misunderstandings between both parties that would ultimately doom the partnership, the FOA says. From American Lease’s perspective, the main issue is a lack of payment, not the contract.
“We basically made a deal on the courthouse steps,” Bleiberg says. “We’re laying out millions of dollars on a handshake deal that was very public so we didn’t feel like we had to get it in writing. The whole world knows about it. And I liked the guys I was dealing with at the FOA. They were a bunch of straight shooters and I felt they were OK.”
The FOA describes this time as very rushed. The group brought up the idea of a contract, but talks failed to progress because “that’s now how Josh does things,” Yang says.
“It was a fluid landscape,” the FOA’s Fleming adds. “We were finding out new things every day, [American Lease] was finding out new things every day. Maybe it wasn’t a perfect partnership, but in hard times you have to change the way you look for allies and open yourself to something you might have otherwise been skeptical about.”
American Lease paid the first $500,000 to Heights Capital in December, but the FOA didn’t pay them back until a month later after successfully pushing Bleiberg to sign an informal Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). The FOA says it still has not received any access to the IP or code base, as promised. In January, it sent American Lease their Vehicle Identification Numbers (VINs) to add to the program, but says not everyone got enrolled.
Henrik Fisker, automotive entrepreneur and founder of Fisker (Credit: picture alliance / Contributor / picture alliance via Getty Images)
‘Hodgepodge’ 2.2 Software Update Deepens Mistrust
One thing American Lease and the FOA agree on is that the 2.2 software update was a disaster. It was supposed to address several technical issues and Fisker began deploying it in May and June 2024. But that “halted” when it filed for bankruptcy, Bleiberg says.
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The release was crucial because parts of it addressed software recalls required by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Between November 2024 and January 2025, Indigo began redeployment, but it ended up being “a hodgepodge and a mess,” Bleiberg says. “That’s where communication started to sour.”
The update, as developed by Fisker, fully bricked about 10% of cars, the FOA estimates. One driver says he took his Fisker EV to the shop to get the upgrade, and “a day later it stopped at the red light in the middle of the rush hour and won’t shift to any gear.” Drivers were routinely coming to the FOA looking for answers while they paid out of pocket for issues an OEM would typically cover in an ordinary recall scenario. Indigo’s deployment dragged on for months and was difficult for Fisker drivers to manage.
“There were so many [electronic control units] running, the battery would drain and the car would get bricked,” Bleiberg says. The update would work for one driver, but not another. “It depended on how healthy your car was, how strong your signal was, and if you got into the car and interrupted [the update], it could brick the car.”
The FOA stepped in to manage, and scheduled drivers to get the update in waves of 100, but it was hectic. “An owner in California would be told, for example, set aside a two-day period where you don’t touch your car and an OTA update will come from Indigo,” Yang says. Sometimes Indigo would not push out the update within the 48-hour window, and when a driver tried to use their vehicle, it would cancel the update. “So we would complain to Indigo, and they wouldn’t respond,” Yang says.
“At some point, we needed to pick our lane and our lane needed to be with the owners, because they were asking us to give them information about what was happening and we weren’t getting timely information from American Lease or Indigo, and that caused an erosion of trust in us,” Fleming adds.
Bleiberg says Indigo found the FOA difficult to work with because they “didn’t want to share customer information, they wanted to build a blind API to protect customer information.”
The FOA claims the NHTSA is investigating American Lease for its handling of the recalls due to an unprecedented number of customer complaints. We reached out to the NHTSA for comment and will update this story if we hear back. Bleiberg says American Lease “spoke to NHTSA” and “they are satisfied with our progress, which has been very successful thus far.”
Payment Dispute Is the Final Straw
There was no payment from the FOA to American Lease after the first $500,000. In April, Bleiberg told the FOA that American Lease had paid $860,000 to tech vendors (Amazon, GitHub, Jama, Microsoft, and T-Mobile) and expected the FOA to cover some of that. But the bill only included lump sums, such as a $478,000 payment to Microsoft. It did not break down how much covered commercial vehicles versus private Fisker EVs managed by the FOA.
FOA member Guillaume Eniona proposed on an email chain that they split the bill based on the known number of cars in each bucket (60% FOA cars, 40% American Lease operated). The FOA’s portion was $515,000, which American Lease agreed to invoice. The FOA never paid.
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There seems to have been some disagreement within the FOA, because Fleming says that Eniona did not have the authority to propose the 60-40 split because he’s “not a board member.” (The FOA is a volunteer organization and senior members aren’t paid.)
The FOA decided it needed to put the issue up to a vote among its members. They believe American Lease owed them a more formal itemization, including the amount American Lease had paid by month, rather than a lump sum, as well as confirmation that they were not paying for the commercial vehicles owned by American Lease. With an international member base, they also wanted to know what portion of the bills went toward US-specific software issues.
All of this would help them justify the new, larger costs to members, but Bleiberg did not provide it and did not ask vendors like Microsoft for more details because “that’s validating that I acknowledge they’re changing the details on us and I’m not doing that,” he says. “Microsoft just provides one big bill. This is a partnership, not a vendor invoicing a customer in an environment that wasn’t built to provide that level of detail.”
The FOA is skeptical that Microsoft can’t provide per-vehicle information. Bleiberg “created a walled garden that only he can see into,” Bagley says.
From American Lease’s perspective, they’re footing the bill for expensive services, with no end in sight. “All we’ve done since the beginning of this relationship is lose and put up capital for free,” Bleiberg says. “They put this narrative out there that the big bad corporation is trying to take their money, when the reality is we’ve been their free bank.”
The FOA says it discussed ways to cut costs with American Lease. The T-Mobile bill was lowered slightly, for example, though not by as much as the FOA expected, and they don’t feel the cost-cutting efforts are a priority for American Lease. “Josh makes a lot of promises and then they don’t come through and we’re left holding the bag,” Yang says.
Before the FOA could take all of this to their members for a vote, American Lease shut off access on May 15. “They were just like, ‘We’re done, we’re shutting it off unless you give us all the money in the bill right now,'” Fleming says.
FOA member email sent out on May 15. (Credit: Fisker Owner’s Association)
“The reasons they got shut off is the board changed the deal we made,” Bleiberg says. “The amount they were supposed to pay was always a calculation of per paying vehicles in the fleet. This is far from an abrupt shutoff. They thought they were going to be able to string us along, and we’re not going to continue to pay for costs they have no plan to give us.”
The FOA sent American Lease $228,000 on May 15 to cover the T-Mobile bill, which it says was properly itemized. But it was about $287,000 short, so American Lease severed access.
“It’s like [American Lease] pays the family plan,” Yang says. “Individual [Fisker] owners have tried to break off to pay their own connectivity plans, but it’s like mom and dad say, ‘No.’ But it’s not a phone, it’s an $80,000 vehicle. There’s no law governing any of this.”
Where Do Fisker EVs Go From Here?
Both parties agree the relationship is beyond repair, and are pursuing their own paths to keep the privately owned vehicles connected.
The 7,500 privately owned Fisker EVs around the world do not have connectivity at this point. American Lease says the FOA is advertising that number to its members, but argues it’s “sensationalist” because the group has closer to 4,000 members.
Bleiberg says Indigo’s new connectivity plan will be available “in a week or two, I hope.” He has full confidence in their abilities, despite the 2.2 update fiasco, and does not believe the FOA can offer a comparable solution. “Indigo is awesome,” he says. “They’ll always be needed. How quickly they’ve been able to take over the environment and stabilize it they’ve done a terrific job.”
The FOA intentionally hid its efforts to develop an independent solution, Bleiberg says, and could be doing it to develop its own revenue stream. The FOA similarly feels that American Lease, via Indigo, is seizing the opportunity to charge Fisker drivers a premium, because they have no other option. Both have no shortage of accusations to levy against the other, though all remains speculative at this point.
“This whole situation begs for some kind of regulation,” Fleming says. “We need more consumer protections for software-connected cars. There has to be more transparency, and a model of car ownership that gives drivers far more control.”
About Emily Forlini
Senior Reporter
