{"id":159600,"date":"2025-08-19T23:18:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-19T23:18:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/159600\/"},"modified":"2025-08-19T23:18:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T23:18:13","slug":"why-nyc-has-a-fleet-of-new-evs-from-a-dead-carmaker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/159600\/","title":{"rendered":"Why NYC has a fleet of new EVs from a dead carmaker"},"content":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) \u2014<\/strong> Even under the unrelenting sun of the hottest day of the year in New York City, Ruben Baldera looks cool. He\u2019s comfortably air-conditioned in his charcoal gray Fisker Ocean, a luxury electric SUV that originally retailed for $70,000 or more. But the company that owns this SUV and rents it to Baldera bought it brand-new\u00a0last year for\u00a0a mere $16,000.<\/p>\n

Once one of the next-big-thing EV startups poised to take on Tesla, Fisker Inc. declared bankruptcy in 2024, having built about 11,000 examples of its first and only model. (That\u2019s not counting the previous car company started by founder Henrik Fisker, which\u00a0went bust\u00a0in 2013 before making 2,500 cars.) A company called American Lease, the largest fleet operator in NYC, swept in to buy up about 2,800\u00a0unsold Ocean SUVs; now American Lease rents them to ride-hailing and for-hire car service drivers like Baldera at a rate of $330 per week.<\/p>\n

So for\u00a0the next few years, the streets of New York City will be just about the only\u00a0place\u00a0in the world where you\u2019re likely to see a Fisker Ocean in the wild.<\/p>\n

\"Ride-hailing<\/p>\n

Ride-hailing driver Ruben Baldera behind the wheel of the new Ocean he rents.<\/p>\n

Photo credit Raphael Orlove\/Bloomberg CityLab<\/p>\n

Even amid the 100,000-plus for-hire vehicles across the city, it\u2019s easy to spot Fisker Oceans. The mid-size\u00a0crossovers look\u00a0something like a BMW X3, but not quite, and some models boast unusual features like\u00a0a solar roof that feeds extra juice to the battery when the car is\u00a0parked in the sun. Check the license plate: If it starts with a T and ends with a C, it\u2019s licensed by the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission. American Lease is responsible for every one of these for-hire Fiskers.<\/p>\n

The curious collection of orphan EVs came about because of a collision between local and national electrification policies. In 2023,\u00a0New York City\u00a0launched the Green Rides initiative, mandating\u00a0that all Uber or Lyft rides be either wheelchair-accessible or zero-emissions by 2030. But the supply of affordable all-electric\u00a0vehicles is very limited, as the\u00a0administration of President Donald Trump has sought to\u00a0eliminate\u00a0federal incentives and tax credits and\u00a0roll back pollution\u00a0and fuel economy standards that encourage EV uptake.<\/p>\n

That left\u00a0fleet operator\u00a0American Lease, which has about 5,000 vehicles, with few low-budget options to replace their existing gas-powered cars.\u00a0In early 2024, when the rental giant\u00a0Hertz announced it would sell off\u00a0much of its EVs, American Lease\u00a0considered loading up on used rental Teslas. Then another, crazier option emerged.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were sitting at lunch and I was reading an article about how Henrik Fisker, who founded Fisker, had listed his home for more than the market cap of the company at that point,\u201d says American Lease executive vice president Josh Bleiberg. \u201cSo I was like, \u2018Screw it: Let\u2019s buy Fisker.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Ocean\u2019s Unraveling<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fisker\u2019s June 2024 collapse\u00a0came about for multiple reasons. In 2020, the fledgling company went public through a special purpose acquisition company,\u00a0or SPAC, allowing\u00a0it to bypass the traditional IPO process. It was part of a pandemic-era\u00a0mania\u00a0for\u00a0SPAC mergers that included several other EV startups, including\u00a0Lordstown Motors, Nikola and Canoo. All have since\u00a0gone under.<\/p>\n

But Fisker also had a product with significant problems:\u00a0When the Ocean hit the market in 2023,\u00a0reviews of the model were scathing, as testers wrestled with its glitchy tech and federal safety regulators demanded\u00a0six recalls for safety issues.<\/p>\n

Still, Baldera says he isn\u2019t worried about piloting\u00a0his rented Ocean through the mean streets of New York, and his has been trouble-free so far. \u201cNo problems\u201d is his quick summation.<\/p>\n

Well, other than the ghost light. \u201cSometimes it goes on by itself,\u201d Baldera says, pointing to the dome light over the passengers, which can flicker for 10 or 15 minutes before it resets itself.<\/p>\n

Like many other American Lease Ocean drivers Bloomberg CityLab spoke to, this is Baldera\u2019s first EV.\u00a0Going electric has been easy: He\u00a0powers up near his home in the Bronx at night, when electricity rates are lower, and\u00a0covers \u201cclose to 100 miles a day.\u201d The Ocean can do more than 300 on a charge (so long as he stays away from \u201csport\u201d mode, good for a 0-60 launch in a blistering 4 seconds).<\/p>\n

Knowing that drivers will spend time charging, the company makes its Oceans less expensive to rent than the equivalent gas-burning Toyota, but they don\u2019t feel like a budget option. These Fiskers are nice inside, with a high-quality interior full of \u201ceco-leather\u201d and other green\u00a0materials, a full-length sunroof\u00a0and a \u201cCalifornia Mode\u201d that drops all the windows, including the two tiny rear \u201cdoggie\u201d windows.<\/p>\n

Actually, watch out for California Mode. Some of those windows can get stuck and need a reset back at American Lease\u2019s Bronx headquarters, where\u00a0Fiskers are stacked three or four high on vertical parking lifts.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s just a few blocks from the Hunts Point Terminal Market, the main food distribution center for the city. Only a fraction of American Lease\u2019s Oceans are here \u2014 the rest are squirreled away in storage facilities around the city. Nearby is BHP Service Center, an old-school repair shop that handles the body work for American Lease\u2019s Fiskers, and the company recently set up its own lot around the corner for\u00a0crashed Fiskers\u00a0as they come in.\u00a0This industrial corner of Hunts Point, where semi-trucks lumber past junkyards and wholesalers, is fast becoming home base for a\u00a0cottage industry devoted to the dead brand.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0an office overlooking American Lease\u2019s main warehouse, Bleiberg explains how it came about.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have traditionally been a Toyota shop, and we have a semi-large quantity of the Toyota bZ4X,\u201d he says,\u00a0mentioning the mainstream EV that retails for around $40,000.<\/p>\n

Fisker\u2019s fire-sale Oceans could be had for about\u00a0$16,000 per car, somewhere in the mid-$40-million range all-in. Elsewhere, it\u2019s not difficult to buy a new made-in-China EV for $16,000 or less, but to get such a deal in the US, American Lease had to take a chance on something very left field \u2014 and not without complications.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

A sea of Oceans in Hunts Point. American Lease owns about 2,800 examples of the ill-starred model.<\/p>\n

Photo credit Raphael Orlove\/Bloomberg CityLab<\/p>\n

According to Bleiberg, the decision to buy up the remaining Fisker inventory in\u00a0summer 2024 morphed into a drawn-out process involving bankruptcy court, private owners of Fiskers, and another EV startup contracted to deal with the Ocean\u2019s buggy software.<\/p>\n

Like many modern vehicles, the\u00a0Fisker Ocean is a \u201cconnected car.\u201d Keeping one on the road means keeping up with constant\u00a0over-the-air software updates from the manufacturer. To\u00a0keep its Fisker fleet connected,\u00a0American Lease turned to an\u00a0EV startup called indiGO Technologies, which\u00a0is developing its own line of electric delivery vans and cabs. American Lease not only put in a purchase order to buy the first Indigo EVs in a couple years, but also contracted the company to take over software maintenance.<\/p>\n

At first, indiGO Tech would just be managing American Lease\u2019s cars, said company\u00a0CEO Will Graylin, but it turned out that they\u2019d also need to be responsible for thousands of Fisker Oceans in private hands\u00a0across the US and Europe:\u00a0\u201cIt wasn\u2019t anticipated.\u201d<\/p>\n

American Lease first worked as an intermediary between the Fisker Owners Association (which represents private Ocean owners)\u00a0and indiGO (which was trying to fix Ocean\u2019s final software update). In the automaker\u2019s dying months, Fisker\u2019s engineers had raced to complete a\u00a0software package that\u00a0included\u00a0updates\u00a0required to comply with federally mandated recalls; it was so bloated that some owners said it was \u201cbricking\u201d their cars, rendering them inoperable.<\/p>\n

After a\u00a0dispute over responsibilities and payments,\u00a0the FOA went independent and American Lease stepped out of the intermediary role. Now the FOA is figuring out how to manage its cars\u2019 software, recalls and all, on its own. Meanwhile, indiGO split Fisker\u2019s final file into three distinct parts and is having an easier time getting cars updated.<\/p>\n

Untangling the mess took long enough that American Lease only began launching its fleet of\u00a0Oceans in March. Now more than 1,000 cars are picking up rides across the city. \u201cThere are cars that break. There are cars that can be cannibalized for parts. If I can get this up to 2,200, 2,500 cars on the road,\u201d Bleiberg says, \u201cthat\u2019ll be full utilization.\u201d<\/p>\n

Only in New York<\/strong><\/p>\n

Despite their\u00a0reputation for troublesome tech, American Lease\u2019s\u00a0Oceans\u00a0have been working out fine so far. The cars do have their gremlins, like a too-sensitive driver-facing camera that sometimes shifts the car into park if the driver turns around in their seat. Like private Fisker owners, ride-hailing drivers swap tips for workarounds and live with the quirks.<\/p>\n

Bleiberg is withholding judgement until seeing how the\u00a0cars hold up to a full New York winter. For now there are at least plenty of spares to patch up any fender benders.<\/p>\n

The Oceans join\u00a0the company of oddball\u00a0only-in-NYC vehicles pressed into livery service over the years, going all the way back to the battery-powered cabs of the Electric Vehicle Company \u2014\u00a0the biggest car company\u00a0in the US in 1899. New York\u2019s transportation ecosystem manages to attract\u00a0machines\u00a0you rarely see anywhere else, from the sturdy Checker Marathons\u00a0still on the road\u00a0nearly two decades after the last one rolled off the assembly line\u00a0to the less-loved Nissan NV200 \u201cTaxi of Tomorrow\u201d that appeared in the 2010s.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s funny is that even though American Lease bought these cars to prepare for the Green Rides initiative, Bleiberg doesn\u2019t expect the\u00a0Oceans\u00a0to make it to the 2030 deadline. \u201cWe don\u2019t anticipate these cars lasting much past 150,000 to 200,000 miles,\u201d he says. That\u2019s about four years of hard ride-hailing service.<\/p>\n

Within a few years, Bleiberg expects automakers will be able to\u00a0bring lower-cost\u00a0solid-state EVs to market. Ideally, fleet operators like American Lease will be able buy cheap electric models from legacy manufacturers and Manhattan will be wall-to-wall zero-emission cabs by 2030. But in another scenario,\u00a0affordable EVs never quite make it to the US, Green Rides gets shelved, and a few hundred Fisker\u00a0Oceans are still rolling through the city in five years, artifacts of the last decade\u2019s EV fever \u2014 a what-if moment in automotive history.<\/p>\n

Either way, the people at American Lease seem\u00a0confident they can figure it out; there\u2019s a sense of fuhgeddaboudit to this operation. After all, as Bleiberg puts it, \u201cit\u2019s just a car.\u201d<\/p>\n

More stories like this are available on\u00a0<\/strong>bloomberg.com<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) \u2014 Even under the unrelenting sun of the hottest day of the year in New…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":159601,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-159600","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-newyork","12":"tag-newyorkcity","13":"tag-ny","14":"tag-nyc","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-united-states-of-america","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115057990352305992","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159600\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/159601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}