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When I visited the Electrify Expo in Long Beach, California last month, the traditional automakers had set up tents and booths buzzing with happy representatives ready to show off their electric and electrified vehicles to the media and the public. And then there was Fisker, where one lonely man sat amid a group of Ocean EVs, wondering whether anyone would talk to him.
The writing was already on the wall that day. This week, the electric startup filed for its inevitable Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
In March, Fisker slashed the prices of its vehicles in a desperate attempt to stave off bankruptcy. It did not succeed, nor was there ever a real chance that it would. The collapse marks the second failed car company for founder Henrik Fisker, and the list of reasons makes for an excellent business school case study in what not to do. But for those of us who own an electric vehicle, or may soon buy one, Fisker’s downfall brings up a question that’s especially pointed for anyone buying a car from an EV startup: What happens if the company that made your car isn’t around anymore?
The problem is as old as the car industry. While Ford and Chevrolet feel like they’ve been around since the dawn of time, automotive history is littered with car brands that don’t make cars anymore. Studebaker. Hudson. Pontiac. Oldsmobile. Saturn. Packard. One could go on. When the companies disappeared, their vehicles became “orphan cars” with no parent company around to make parts for or fix them.
Not every orphanage looks the same. Pontiac and Oldsmobile, for example, were divisions of General Motors by the time they were killed off, so GM remained to honor warranty claims on the cars. Plymouth owners had parent company Chrysler to turn to when that marque went to the chrome mausoleum. Sometimes, a car brand like Isuzu or Suzuki quits selling cars in the American market but the company itself remains intact, and so many have been sold previously that plenty of shops and mechanics who know how to work on those vehicles remain.
When a car company that hasn’t operated in the United States for many years disappears entirely, things get dicier. Enthusiasts still collect and drive vehicles from long-dead carmakers. But acquiring parts for them can be a wild goose chase, and maintaining them relies on knowledge passed down among a select few.
Here in the EV era, the few-thousand people who bought (and actually received) a Fisker Ocean are in a tight spot. Their warranty coverage will technically endure as long as Fisker’s court proceedings are ongoing, since it’s always possible that the company could emerge from Chapter 11 and still exist on the other side. As long as Fisker is in limbo, Ocean owners might be able to get the company to fix their cars.
If the company truly goes belly-up, though — which seems like the likeliest outcome — then all bets are off. Fisker’s assets would be liquidated, and owners may be lost in the shuffle as the automaker’s pieces are sold off for pennies on the dollar to anybody who might want them.
Any Fisker-specific parts would be extremely hard to come by if the company (which was slow on its production goals in the first place) vanishes. There would be no more over-the-air software updates to add features or fix bugs; that’s more bad news since right up to the point of bankruptcy, the company was sending out updates just to fix basic operations. Even relatively simple repairs may be hard to achieve once Fisker is no more. The U.S. faces an ongoing shortage of auto mechanics trained to fix electric vehicles, which are an entirely different beast compared to internal combustion. It’s not like any old garage down the street could or would work on an Ocean.
Ocean owners are not silently accepting this crappy outcome. A bunch of them just banded together to form the Fisker Owners Association in the hopes of collectively keeping their rides driveable and viable long after Fisker the company is no more. They are fighting for ongoing support of the Ocean’s software and continued access to the 4G internet the vehicle needs for its in-car navigation system to work. They are tearing apart their Oceans to find out which parts are common and which are proprietary, and using that knowledge to build a database for all Fisker drivers.
Their troubles — and their collective action to take more control over their own cars — should be a note of both warning and hope to other EV drivers. Perhaps the disarray at Fisker makes it a special case that was doomed to fail at some point. But even respected and well-regarded EV startups like Lucid and Rivian aren’t in the rosiest financial situation. The former had to severely slow down its production projections; the latter is trying to navigate the “valley of death” until it can get its mass-market R2 and R3 vehicles on sale. Even EV king Tesla was reportedly “about a month” from bankruptcy during the dire months of 2020 when it tried to scale up manufacturing of the Model 3. Oh, and there was that time in the 2000s that Detroit’s Big Three nearly collapsed.
Rivian and Lucid owners are surely in a better spot than their Fisker counterparts — both companies are in a better position to succeed than Fisker ever was, and are more likely to receive the investment they’ll need to avoid going to bankruptcy court, should it ever come to that. But there’s never a sure thing in life, and owning an EV from a new company inherently generates some risk of becoming an orphan.
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.