The orphaned Fisker Ocean is finally learning to drive itself
A $999 third-party box wants to finish what Fisker never shipped: real hands-free driving for the abandoned Ocean EV.
The Fisker Ocean might finally get the one feature buyers were promised back when the brand was still alive — and that the brand itself never delivered. The electric crossover shipped with all the hardware needed for hands-free driving, but Fisker went bankrupt in 2024 without ever releasing the software. Now a third-party company, Comma AI, has picked up the unfinished job.
The situation feels almost symbolic for the Ocean. The car is long out of production, the manufacturer is gone, owners are stuck footing their own repair bills — yet one of the big promises might still come true. Just not thanks to Fisker, and not for free.
Comma AI is already testing support for the Ocean. In a published video, the electric crossover drives down a city street with no steering input from the driver. The demo still looks like an early prototype: wires are visible, only steering is supported, and automatic acceleration and braking aren’t there yet. The software also sits in a separate branch and isn’t available to the public yet.
Here’s the key detail: Comma AI’s system doesn’t use the Fisker Ocean’s factory ADAS sensors at all. Instead, a separate Comma Four unit gets mounted on the windshield, packing three cameras, a mini-computer, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 MAX chip, an accelerometer, a gyroscope, high-precision GPS, and a microphone. The device plugs into the car’s CAN bus and can control steering, acceleration, and braking based on what the cameras see. It’s essentially an external “brain” bolted onto the car on top of the factory electronics.
Comma AI claims its system can bring automatic lane centering, adaptive cruise control, lane-change assistance, and driver monitoring to more than 300 models. For the Fisker Ocean, that matters more than usual: the car was physically ready for advanced driver-assist features, it just never got the software. The device costs $999, while the software itself is free.
For Ocean owners, it’s a bitter trade-off. On one hand, there’s finally a shot at getting a feature the car should have had from day one. On the other, they’ll have to pay again for a car that has already become the textbook example of the risk of buying an EV from an unstable startup. Fisker built roughly 11,200 Ocean crossovers in total at Magna’s plant in Austria.
Most of them went to private buyers, while about 3,200 ended up with American Lease and are now running as rideshare vehicles in New York. This story sums up a new problem in the car industry pretty well. A modern car can have all the cameras, radars, wiring, and compute hardware in the world — but without working software, none of it means anything.
Owners used to worry about running out of spare parts. Now they can lose the features they already paid for, too. For the Fisker Ocean, third-party hands-free driving won’t be a full resurrection — more like a patch that arrived too late. But for owners of these “orphaned” EVs, even a patch might end up mattering more than the loud promises the maker never got to keep.