The buyer, a New York-area leasing company called American Lease, says in a new filing that Fisker now believes there is no way to transfer the information connected to each SUV to a new server not owned by the bankrupt EV startup. Since American Lease needs that information to operate the vehicles after Fisker is dissolved, the leasing company has filed an emergency objection to the startup’s liquidation plan.
Not an expert, but the only thing I can imagine is that it’s related to certificates or keypairs used for encrypted communication / authentication. Afaik ssl certificates can be issued to a given company, for example, and might become invalid when that company no longer exists. Or it becomes impossible to issue new ones.
Something in that vein, maybe.
My other guess was that they’ve hard-coded an IP address in their firmware and they’ve already sold off the IP range.
Or they fired all the technical staff and no longer have anyone left that “does the computers” (as my parents say about my job as a software engineer)
I suspect something like the first one, where those cars will call home to a certain IP address, and the fact that the company might not exist one day never crossed anyone’s mind.