When you buy a brand-new car, you buy it knowing it’s going to depreciate. At least as long as it’s a relatively normal car and not something like a Porsche 911 R. That said, it’s not as bad as many “never buy a new car for any reason ever” financial influencers make it sound. You probably won’t get back every penny if you tried to sell a new car the next day, but you won’t actually lose 30 percent the moment you drive it off the lot. Unless you’re Edmunds and recently bought a Fisker Ocean for testing, that is.
Back in January, Edmunds bought a Fisker Ocean to add to its long-term testing fleet. The 2023 Fisker Ocean Extreme cost the outlet $69,012 (nice!) and was about as loaded as an Ocean could get without all the promised over-the-air updates. Last Friday, after only two months of testing, it published an article with the headline “Do Not Buy A Fisker Ocean,” which we have to agree is great advice. Fisker’s looming bankruptcy and software that still needs improving make it hard to justify spending even $24,999 on a new Ocean right now.
The bigger shock came when Edmunds took its Ocean in for an appraisal at a local CarMax. When the appraisal came back, CarMax told Edmunds its two-month-old car with only 4,220 miles (ooh, so close!) was worth just $21,000. If you do some quick back-of-the-napkin math, that means the Fisker Ocean lost 69 percent (not nice!) of its value in about the same amount of time it takes for Netflix to air a single season of Love Is Blind.
Using Edmunds’ own math, if a new vehicle typically loses 20 percent of its value in the first year and 15 percent per year after, that works out to something like five years of depreciation in two months. That’s just absurd. Even if you’re OK with the fact that you probably won’t ever get the features that Fisker originally promised, with depreciation like that, you’d be a fool to buy a new Ocean right now.
However, if any Fisker dealer out there is reading this and willing to do a straight trade, I could probably be convinced to part with my 2008 Subaru Forester that needs an engine rebuild and a new transmission. It’s not worth much, but neither are your Oceans, so actually, you might end up owing me money. Just don’t expect me to agree to wait until next month to cash that check. I may not be very smart, but I’m at least smarter than that.