EV maker Fisker slashes prices as potential bankruptcy looms

If you’ve been jonesing for a Fisker electric vehicle, now’s certainly the time to pick one up cheap. The company has slashed the price of its Ocean SUV, with the top-end Extreme model going for a mere $37,499, down 39% from $61,499. But these are, er, Extreme measures for Fisker that could presage the end of the company.

As Fortune’s Prarthana Prakash details in this piece out today, the New York Stock Exchange yesterday suspended trading in Fisker’s stock, after the company revealed the collapse of talks with an unnamed major automaker, reportedly Nissan. A delisting, which the NYSE is now planning due to “abnormally low” price levels—Fisker’s share price has been below a dollar since January and was trading at 9 cents before the suspension—could very quickly push the firm into bankruptcy. As Fisker said in a Monday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission), delisting would force it to offer to repurchase convertible notes, thus triggering a default as it doesn’t have the cash to actually do this.

Fisker already paused production last week. The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Office of Defects (must be a fun place to work) is looking into the Ocean’s apparent issues with “partial loss of braking over low traction surfaces, without alerting the driver.”

So, cheap Fisker, anyone?

Of course, it isn’t just Fisker that’s struggling in the EV market right now. Tesla just had to make the grim decision to trim its Chinese production due to slow growth—a problem that is by no means confined to Tesla’s Chinese operations. CEO Elon Musk now hopes to stimulate North American growth by forcing new Tesla owners to experience a test of the car’s “Full Self-Driving” technology, which still falls short of the promise implicit in its name, though Musk told staffers that “almost no one actually realizes how well (supervised) FSD actually works.”

Even Tesla’s nemesis, the market-leading BYD, is having issues. An earnings miss today knocked 6.1% off the Chinese superstar’s share price, even as it set out a 20% growth target for this year’s exports. BYD is slashing prices to tempt buyers away from rivals like Toyota and Volkswagen. Unlike with Fisker, this is a move born out of aggression rather than desperation. All this price-cutting certainly makes it hard to compete in such a turbulent EV scene, where sales are slowing around the world.

The big question is how long the turbulence will last because it will be temporary. The world simply has to stop burning fossil fuels—and yes, I know that’s probably the most complicated “simply” in existence. But global heating is accelerating and we just cannot rescue ourselves while also continuing to pump carbon into the atmosphere at anything like the rate we do now. The Biden administration certainly recognizes this, having last week laid out a timeline for phasing out gas-guzzlers within the next eight years, so by 2032 most new cars in the U.S. will have to be zero-carbon (there’s still some scope for hybrids, which is contentious in itself).

This reality dictates that the current EV slump will not persist. But that will be cold comfort to the players who can’t stay afloat. The U.K.’s Arrival already bit the dust last month, and Fisker would need a miracle to avoid the same fate. More news below.

David Meyer

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NEWSWORTHY

Facebook’s Ghostbusters shame. New documents unsealed in a class action consumer lawsuit over Meta’s data collection show that the company used its Onavo virtual private network service to intercept traffic between Snapchat’s users and servers, so it could learn how people used the Facebook rival. “Project Ghostbusters,” designed to fulfill a demand from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, apparently began in 2016 and was later expanded to Amazon and YouTube, TechCrunch reports. Onavo bit the dust in 2019 after TechCrunch reported Facebook was paying teens to use the “privacy” service so it could spy on their phone activity.

Apple AI Day. Mark your calendars for June 10, for that is the day Apple will finally detail its AI strategy at its Worldwide Developers Conference. According to Bloomberg, AI will be “front and center” for the incoming iOS 18 upgrade. How front and center? Marketing chief Greg Joswiak said this WWDC would be “Absolutely Incredible.” MacOS, Apple Watch, and the Vision Pro will also see upgrades, though it’s less clear what role AI might play there.

TikTok enforces rules. TikTok is reportedly cracking down on Chinese e-commerce firms selling stuff on its U.S. shop if they aren’t majority U.S.-owned. It’s had a policy on such things since it set up TikTok Shop last September, but, according to Reuters, the under-fire platform is now moving to properly enforce the policy, leading many Chinese vendors to complain of reduced prominence and support in the U.S.  

SIGNIFICANT FIGURES

8 million

—The number of British workers who could lose their jobs to AI, according to a new report from the Institute for Public Policy Research. That’s nearly a quarter of the U.K.’s working population.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

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Marc Benioff alludes to the market’s possible AI oversaturation by joking about a “genius” toothbrush, by Chloe Berger

Do shake-ups at 2 high-profile AI companies signal more to come?, by Verne Kopytoff

We’re in the ‘third quarter’ of the AI contest, says Walmart International’s CEO—but companies are still trying to get the technology to do too much, by Lionel Lim

After betting $1 billion on podcasts, Spotify is launching video learning courses in the U.K.—including a $44 ‘Dog Body Language’ class, by Ryan Hogg

BEFORE YOU GO

Copilot key required. How will you know if your new Windows PC is an “AI PC”? It will have a chatbot-summoning Copilot key on the keyboard, and a neural processing unit (NPU) alongside the traditional CPU and GPU. That’s according to Microsoft’s requirements, which, as The Verge reports, diverge somewhat from Intel’s. Intel, which revealed Microsoft’s insistence on the Copilot key, maintains that PCs featuring its new Core Ultra chips (such as the new Asus ROG Zephyrus) are still AI PCs, despite the fact that they don’t have the all-important key.