The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened a third investigation into EV startup Fisker’s Ocean SUV, this time centered on problems getting the doors to open.
The agency says the complaints point to a an “intermittent failure” of the door latch and handle system.
The Ocean SUV is already being investigated by ODI over problems with its braking system, and for complaints about the vehicle rolling away on uneven surfaces.
It paused production of the Ocean in March and reported just $121 million in the bank.
But the new safety probe suggests a deeper problem with the SUV’s doors.
EV startup Fisker is pausing production of its electric Ocean SUV for six weeks as it scrambles for a cash infusion.
The company said in a Monday morning regulatory filing that it had just $121 million in cash and cash equivalents as of March 15th, $32 million of which is restricted or not immediately accessible.
Fisker finished 2023 having shipped roughly 5,000 of the 10,000 cars that its contract manufacturing partner, Magna Steyr, produced.
Automotive manufacturing is incredibly expensive, even for a company like Fisker which is outsourcing much of the work to suppliers like Magna.
In the near-term, Fisker said Monday it is trying to raise $150 million through the sale of convertible notes.
Ocean intelligence company Saildrone has just put the first of a new generation of Surveyor autonomous vessels in the water: an aluminum version that the Navy is keen to take advantage of.
Founder and CEO Richard Jenkins told TechCrunch that the demand for vessels like SailDrone’s is only growing.
So far, no one has suggested weaponizing the Saildrone vessels, though.
The Austal line is expected to be able to put out one Surveyor every six weeks to start with.
SD-3000 and a few of its in-progress aluminum kin will be detailed to Navy testing of its capability of producing “surface and undersea intelligence for a range of high-priority applications, including anti-submarine warfare.”
As crucial as the ocean is to countless industries, we lack the kind of systematic knowledge of it that we have of the surface.
This is partly due to the simple fact that the ocean is gigantic and there’s simply no way (or need) to monitor all of it.
Cheap solutions like buoys are great but limited to surface measurements, and are subject to the whims of weather and currents.
“There is such a clear need for safe, reliable and continuously updated data about water quality,” said Ester Strommen, CEO and co-founder of Syrenna.
Free-floating, free-divingI saw a prototype of the WaterDrone, as they call it, while visiting startups last spring in Oslo, where Syrenna is based.
Fisker remains far from meeting CEO and founder Henrik Fisker’s publicly stated goal of delivering 300 electric SUVs per day globally, according to internal documents viewed by TechCrunch.
The EV startup spent much of December aiming to meet an internal sales goal of between 100 and 200 vehicles a day in North America, where the bulk of its inventory and sales efforts are.
Fisker is delivering its SUVs in a number of European countries, and contract manufacturer Magna Steyr builds them in Austria.
Henrik Fisker told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that the lack of a physical footprint has harmed sales here.
The slow pace of deliveries has widened the gulf between the amount of Fisker Ocean SUVs being produced by Magna and the number sold.
