Fisker went bankrupt and owners built open source car company from the ashes | Electrek
Instead of accepting that their cars would become rolling paperweights, Fisker Ocean owners organized, reverse-engineered their vehicles’ proprietary software, hacked into CAN bus networks, built open-source tools on GitHub, and effectively stood up a volunteer-run open-sourced car company from the ashes of Fisker.
On GitHub, a developer named MichaelOE reverse-engineered the API behind Fisker’s official “My Fisker” mobile app and built a Home Assistant integration that exposes every cloud API value as a sensor — with all the app’s buttons available as Home Assistant controls. The project has 135 commits, 20 releases, and is licensed under Apache 2.0. It’s a small but functioning example of what an open-source vehicle interface looks like.
Separately, CAN bus files for the Fisker Ocean have been published on GitHub, including DBC files for CAN viewer filtering and processing. The Ocean runs multiple CAN buses — CCAN, PTCAN, Inverter CAN, and BCAN, all at 500kbps — and community members have been systematically mapping them.
One of the more impressive individual efforts comes from Majd Srour, who published a multi-part series on Medium documenting how to sniff CAN traffic and decode Diagnostic Trouble Codes on the Ocean. The goal: put diagnostic capabilities into mobile apps so owners can run their own DTC scans, instead of relying on dealer tools that no longer exist for a company that no longer exists.