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Fisker lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments for months

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Re: Fisker lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments for months

#41

Post by darth_avocado »

Atotalnoob wrote: post #8
kayodelycaon wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For something as valuable as a car, they definitely can. You still agreed to pay them. However, you can decide to take the whole thing to court and see what a judge thinks about it. In a way, they screwed up and that may affect the contract.

They might have a case to keep the car! There are laws around sending people packages and then demanding payment. I think it was to stop trolls from mailing you garbage and demanding payment afterwards… I’m not a lawyer, them having a purchase agreement in place probably changes things, but a clever lawyer might be able to make a case

Ultimately it boils down to the purchase agreement. Usually the company still has a right to collect payment and in a legal setting, the company will still win because the purchase agreement holds the buyer accountable for payment unless there is a clause in there which dictates the terms of late payment.

Re: Fisker lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments for months

#42

Post by chasers »

gangstead wrote: post #27
chasers wrote: post #17

Rivian lost my full payment for an R1S.

What was the outcome? Free car? A strongly worded letter and you wrote another check?

Not a free car because I paid them.

Funny enough their dashboard showed a payment so I just screenshot that for them to look up in their own db!

Re: Fisker lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments for months

#43

Post by benced »

peterldowns wrote: post #30

Billing and Accounts Payable will always seem like a "how could you mess that up?" problem to engineers, but it literally is difficult and complicated and rife with ways to very seriously and permanently fuck your relationship with your customer. And potentially with your auditors, investors, and whoever performs legal oversight in your jurisdiction. All of the largest companies in the tech world have been hit by AP…

I feel like the concept that keeping track of numbers, particularly with distributed sources and sinks, is hard would actually be very intuitive to engineers.

Re: Fisker lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments for months

#44

Post by peter_l_downs »

jerlam wrote: post #35
peterldowns wrote: post #30

Billing and Accounts Payable will always seem like a "how could you mess that up?" problem to engineers, but it literally is difficult and complicated and rife with ways to very seriously and permanently fuck your relationship with your customer. And potentially with your auditors, investors, and whoever performs legal oversight in your jurisdiction. All of the largest companies in the tech world have been hit by AP…

Fisker became a public company through a SPAC, which allows them to conveniently sidestep a lot of procedures than an IPO would entail.

Ahhhhhh of course. Thanks, that makes sense.

Re: Fisker lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments for months

#45

Post by bigiain »

jmholla wrote: post #36
londons_explore wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More importantly, electric cars use a TLS protocol for charging, and that TLS protocol requires the manufacturers to issue new certificates every (90?) days. If the servers go down, these cars won't be able to charge with DC chargers at all (which requires the TLS protocol), and maybe not with home chargers either (which sometimes uses the TLS protocol).

The 90 days limit is a Let's Encrypt limit. I don't think TLS limits that length in and of itself. Except that it might need to be finite. But I'm not sure that the `Not After` field is required.

For maybe 5 years or so, the maximum expiry time for a TLS cert (for anything under the purview of the Certification Authority Browser Forum) has been just under 400 days.

That's also not a hard technical limit in the TLS spec, you can easily generate a self signed cert that expires in the year 3000 if you want, but it's voluntarily abided by from all the Certificate Authorities that want to have their root certs included in almost every web browser. It's _possible_ that EV chargers don't use common Certificate Authorities, but it feels unlikely to me.

Re: Fisker lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments for months

#46

Post by sema4hacker »

ClassyJacket wrote: post #23
miohtama wrote: post #3

“Checks were not cashed in a timely manner or just lost altogether” only in the US of A, or movies from 70s, something like this.

Truly. I had no idea anyone was still using cheques in 2024. Why weren't they simply doing bank transfers? I don't know if you even could buy a car with a cheque in Australia. In fact we're ending the cheque system entirely in the next few years. I'm 34 and have never written a cheque, and only received about 4 - none of which were in the last 5 years.

I'm an American. A business I own pays for utilities (internet, gas, water, electric, garbage, sewer), workers comp, credit card bills, service people (electrician, carpenter, accountant), income taxes, and insurance by check. At home I also pay my personal utilities, credit card, service people, some medical, income taxes, and insurance by check. In-person over-the-counter purchases are paid by credit card.

Re: Fisker lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments for months

#47

Post by buildsjets »

There is an old Saturday Night Live commercial skit for a fake financial services company, produced in the style of the old Charles Schwab ads. It seems like they could have used some advice from David Schwimmer:

We will make a list of our clients, and how much money each of them has given us to invest. We will keep this list in a safe place. If we have time, we will make a copy of the list, in case something happens to the first list.

We must take special care of the list with each client’s name and the amount of money he has invested. If we were to lose that list, we would be ruined.

If my wife calls while I’m in shagging my secretary, tell her I’m at a board meeting. That way I’ll be able to continue shagging my secretary without my wife knowing about it. If my wife were to find out about me and my secretary, that would be bad. As bad as losing the list.

https://snltranscripts.jt.org/95/95cgrayson1.phtml

https://snltranscripts.jt.org/95/95cgrayson2.phtml

Re: Fisker lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments for months

#48

Post by bigiain »

mvdtnz wrote: post #12
petercooper wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, my mother is in a protracted situation with one of Europe's largest banks and the UK government's savings scheme. She made a transfer of a sum of money to the savings scheme but the bank refused for various reasons, yet the savings scheme acted as if they had received it. She now has the lump sum in both the bank account and the savings scheme with both of them claiming everything is fine and refusing to…

OP was commenting on the use of cheques, which is comical in the rest of the world. Banking errors can happen anywhere.

Yep. I remember having a chequebook. Pretty sure it was around the mid 1990s. I don't remember ever using one, or ever renewing the chequebook. I don't think I've seen an actual paper cheque since the job I quit in 1998.

(I'm from Australia.)

Re: Fisker lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments for months

#49

Post by bigiain »

recursive wrote: post #37
ClassyJacket wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truly. I had no idea anyone was still using cheques in 2024. Why weren't they simply doing bank transfers? I don't know if you even could buy a car with a cheque in Australia. In fact we're ending the cheque system entirely in the next few years. I'm 34 and have never written a cheque, and only received about 4 - none of which were in the last 5 years.

I'm 43, and I don't even know how to do a bank transfer. Sounds amazing. I don't like checks at all. If I don't mind paying a fee, I'll use one of the apps. But for moving money around, checks are all I know. I don't think I'm that unusual in the USA.

I'm in Australia. All the major and I'm pretty sure all or almost all of the minor banks and bank-like businesses (Building Societies and Credit Unions here) use a thing called PayID. I can send almost everybody I know money just by using their mobile phone number or email address, and the transfer happens from my account to theirs literally in seconds. I can also send money to anybody's BSB/Account Number, and that happens pretty much overnight. Writing a check feels like an archaic thing my parents used to do, like dialling a rotary telephone or sending a fax. I'm pretty sure if someone offered me payment by check, I'd turn it down assuming it's a scam. (I'm 56, for comparison)

Re: Fisker lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments for months

#50

Post by bigiain »

firecall wrote: post #25
ClassyJacket wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truly. I had no idea anyone was still using cheques in 2024. Why weren't they simply doing bank transfers? I don't know if you even could buy a car with a cheque in Australia. In fact we're ending the cheque system entirely in the next few years. I'm 34 and have never written a cheque, and only received about 4 - none of which were in the last 5 years.

You can get a Bank Cheque! I've purchased a car privately this way. Although, very sensibly, the seller met us at his bank and paid the Cheque in to his account whilst we were there. Fake Bank Cheques are a thing. I havent used a Cheque Book since the late 1990s. We used to order take-away food in London and then pay with a Cheque and Cheque Guarantee Card when the driver got to the door! Which of course meant you co…

> You can get a Bank Cheque!

> I've purchased a car privately this way.

I've done that, for a motorcycle. It was in 1999. I've bought a dozen or so vehicles since, all paid either in cash (for inexpensive ones) or bank transfer (anything over about $10,000). I'm also in AU.

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