Hacker News — 2026-05-17#

Top Story#

When Fisker went bankrupt, they left 11,000 Ocean SUV owners with $70k vehicles that were rapidly becoming rolling paperweights as the company’s cloud servers went dark. Instead of accepting the loss, an organized collective of 4,000 owners reverse-engineered the proprietary software patches, mapped the CAN buses, built Home Assistant integrations, and essentially stood up an open-source car company from the ashes. It’s a massive, tangible win for the Right to Repair movement and a damning indictment of the “software-defined vehicle” architecture that ties critical functionality to a startup’s fragile runway.