Fisker may have been especially vulnerable to this (my understanding from some very brief searching is that core vehicle functionality required cloud check ins without fallback), but nothing about this is inherent to EVs (this is response to Weisenthal's tweet early in the article). An ICE vehicle could (and many manufacturers are increasingly pushing in this direction) have the exact same problems.

This is a much bigger problem that requires a bigger solution. I'm pretty intrigued by the mention at the end that several european manufacturers are collaborating on an opensource automotive software platform, although their track record on software isn't that encouraging.