“Can I pull your fingernails out as part of an inquisition?” said a Fisker employee to the person who lent the poorly reviewed SUV
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Fisker, like any automotive startup, is facing an uphill battle, and things have only worsened after a recent review from Marques Brownlee, also known as the face behind the MKBHD YouTube channel. Now, a recorded phone call from a Fisker employee to the dealer who lent Brownlee the car – J&S Mitsubishi, is going just as viral as the original review. Both provide insight into the company’s operations and demonstrate its efforts to manage the bad press.
Notably, Brownlee obtained the car from a used car dealer and not from Fisker. In fact, when the EV startup found out that he’d done that, they asked him to wait to review it until a sizable over-the-air update came out. He said no and reviewed it anyway: “it’s not really in my policy to wait on promised future software updates… I’m going to review the car that’s out now that real buyers are actually living with” he said.
Brownlee isn’t an automotive journalist, but he’s portrayed himself as a tech guru. That made his assessment of the Ocean especially poignant since the vast majority of the issues he found were software-related. He complained about how poorly the car recognizes the key as one walks up to it, how strange the infotainment software is, and found even the smoothest driving mode rough.
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MORE: Fisker Ocean Limits Launch Control To 500 Uses For The Lifetime Of The EV
In short, Brownlee’s review highlighted what seemed to be a young company that made design choices that were not well thought out or executed. Since Brownlee posted the video, it has amassed over 4.3 million views, and it appears that Fisker itself has seen it at least once. A member of their team contacted the dealer from whom Brownlee obtained the car, and the ensuing call was as rough as the Ocean itself.
George Saliba, the owner and general manager of J&S Mitsubishi, answered the call. After exchanging pleasantries the used-car dealer asks how he can help the Fisker employee. The response he gets is “Can I pull your fingernails out as part of an inquisition?” As the two continue the Fisker employee asks for information on who the dealer has sold his Fisker to. Clearly speaking about Brownlee, the employee says that all of Fisker’s management is concerned about the review.
He then switches gears to get the car mended. “We have this 2.0 software, it’ll fix a lot of problems but it’s not the holy grail of fixing Fisker, that I’ll be quite candid about,” he says. “We still have some software to revisit, but it will make the car markedly improved,” he continued. Evidently, this review and the negative press that it’s caused was enough for Fisker management to rally the troops.
“Senior management said scrub my schedule and take care of this,” the employee says. In an email to Business Insider, Fisker explained its behavior surrounding the review.
“Fisker continues to introduce new features which improve both driving performance and comfort,” the spokesperson said. “As adoption grows and the number of drivers and miles driven increases, our innovations are tested under a wider range of conditions that reveal ways we can improve. Almost all the issues that have been identified were confined to early-build vehicles, and we are working with early adopters to address issues they might have had.”
Many aspects of this story are surprising, from Fisker reaching out to Brownlee and asking him to delay his review until an update is released, to apparently losing his contact information when they reached out to the used car dealer. Brownlee pointed out that the company seemed young based on its development behaviors and this sort of reaction to bad press feels similar.
However, to be fair, based on our personal experience, we’ve found Fisker’s PR department to be active and responsive. For example, they promptly replied when we inquired about Brownlee’s review, which mentioned limiting the launch control to 500 uses. This level of responsiveness is not always a given with other EV startups, such as Rivian which can be a hit and miss, or in some cases, not at all, as with Tesla.
Fisker is trying to find a long-term partner with cash to help it stay afloat and bad press isn’t helping. Hopefully, it can get off of the bumpy road it’s on and mend things across the board soon.
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