You can check Fisker recalls by VIN on NHTSA the same way you would for any other brand, and a used 2023 Fisker Ocean should come back with six federal campaigns, a 2024 with four. The harder question in mid October 2026 is who actually performs the repair, because Fisker Group Inc. filed for Chapter 11 in June 2024 and liquidated, and the recall enrollment window on Fisker's own site says it ran until June 30, 2026.
So the VIN lookup is the easy half. When we pulled NHTSA's recall API for every Fisker model year on October 15, 2026, the results split cleanly into two families: the 2012 Karma plug-in hybrid with five campaigns, and the Ocean electric SUV with six. Nothing showed up for a 2025 Ocean. If a seller insists there is a 2025, decode the VIN before you go any further.
How to run a Fisker VIN
Read the 17 characters off the windshield plate and the door jamb, match them to the title, then type them into NHTSA's lookup. Our walkthrough on checking recalls by VIN on NHTSA explains what "remedy not yet available" and "incomplete" mean, and both labels matter more than usual on an orphaned brand. If you are not sure which car you are holding, our Fisker VIN decoder shows how the Austrian-built Ocean and the Finnish-built Karma use different prefixes. You can also query the raw NHTSA recalls API for the 2023 Ocean, which is where the campaign numbers below come from.
The six Ocean campaigns
Two campaigns apply only to the 2023 Ocean, and both were handled by over-the-air software. 24V404000 covers motor control and vehicle control software that could drop the SUV into a protection mode and cut drive power. 24V405000 is a compliance problem: the brake, park, and ABS warning lights used the wrong font size, some showed amber instead of red, and several failed the bulb check at startup. NHTSA lists 6,864 vehicles for each.
The other four cover 2023 and 2024 models. 24V466000 is the one we would worry about most on a car with an unknown past, because exterior door handles can stick and fail to open. Fisker's Part 573 report for 24V-466 lists production from February 2023 to May 2024, and NHTSA counts 8,204 vehicles. 24V499000 is a cabin electric water pump that can lose communication and push the battery management system into limp mode; the fix is a new pump. 24V623000 is brake-module software that could unexpectedly reduce regenerative braking, fixed over the air. 24V865000 says the transmission may not shift into the selected gear and the SUV can roll away in Drive or Reverse, and NHTSA's record says the OTA fix went out March 11, 2024.
Look, four of those six are software. If the car sat unplugged for months, or lost cloud connectivity, an OTA campaign can still be open on a vehicle that looks fine in the driveway. Ask the seller to show the software version screen, and do not take "it updates itself" as an answer.
Who pays for the repair after the bankruptcy
This part got messy in public. CNBC reported the June 2024 filing in Delaware. Then, as TechCrunch covered in October 2024, Fisker went back and forth over whether owners would pay labor on the two recalls that need parts, until the Justice Department said charging owners violated federal safety law. Under the approved plan, owners who fixed those recalls before the plan's effective date paid labor up front and claimed it back from the liquidation trustee, and repairs after that date were supposed to be done at authorized service centers without a labor charge.
The law firm that represented Fisker, Davis Polk, summarizes the plan the same way: recall remediation continues after the effective date, and American Lease, which bought roughly 3,300 remaining vehicles, agreed to fund and run the Fisker cloud for five years starting January 1, 2025. As of this morning, fiskerinc.com/recalls is a maintenance page telling 2023 Ocean owners to email for repair or reimbursement, with enrollment "open until June 30th 2026." That date has passed. We cannot tell you whether anyone still answers those inboxes, so if a remedy is open, get a written answer from a repair shop before you price the car as fixed.
The 2012 Karma is a separate file
Karma recalls show Karma Automotive LLC as the manufacturer, not Fisker Inc. NHTSA lists 11V598000 and its expansion 12V241000 for high-voltage battery hose clamps that could leak coolant and cause a fire, 12V413000 for a cooling fan that could short, and two passenger air bag inflator campaigns, 17V004000 and 19V181000, split by the states the car was ever registered in. Those inflator recalls are the reason a Karma that spent years in Florida or Texas deserves a dealer call before a test drive.
What else to pull before you buy
A clean recall screen says nothing about title, accidents, or how the car was used. The last roughly 3,300 unsold Oceans went to American Lease, which Davis Polk describes as a big ride-share lessor in the New York area, so check the use history on the report and read our notes on an open recall on CARFAX. Battery issues get their own page in our used EV battery recalls guide. As of mid October 2026, a CARFAX report through us is about $5.50 as a guest or $4.50 as a member, and a CARFAX plus AutoCheck bundle about $6.75, against roughly $39.99 to $44.99 retail. Prices move, so confirm at checkout. We are a licensed reseller, not affiliated with CARFAX, AutoCheck, or Experian. And if a seller emails you a PDF instead of letting you run the VIN yourself, assume it has been edited until proven otherwise.
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