concept

I was in China this week to witness the unveiling of many new products from a huge Chinese conglomerate you may or may not have ever heard of — LeEco. The company, which recently changed its name from LeTV, took to its own LeSports stadium in Beijing to announce not only several new phones, but a VR headset, some new TV sets, and to top it all off, a concept car.

Follow after the break for a full look at the announcement in less than 5 minutes…

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Update: Check out the full announcement video.

Earlier today, LeEco (previously known as LeTV) announced its first set of China-bound phones since its rebranding, but the company also used today’s event in Beijing — attended by more than 10,000 people — to unveil its first all-electric concept car dubbed LeSee…

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Vokswagen sent out a press release this morning with new images to tease an upcoming electric plug-in hybrid SUV concept to be unveiled at the Beijing Auto show next week.

The company describes the concept as a “premium SUV’ and it will release the concept under its VW brand – even though Volkswagen as another premium electric SUV, although all-electric, coming out under its luxury brand: Audi.
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Although Toyota is betting big on hydrogen vehicles, the Japanese automaker seems to be slowly warming up to electric vehicles as an alternative to broaden its lineup of zero-emission cars. This week, the automaker unveiled a new electric vehicle concept in partnership with Clemson University’s International Center for Automotive Research (CU-ICAR).

Unfortunately for EV enthusiast, it’s another ‘weird-mobile’ and it’s called the uBox.
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When I saw the concept this morning, I didn’t think I was going to report on it since it has nothing to do with electric vehicles, yet I somehow had the feeling it will come up because of the doors. Sure enough, tech publications have been reporting that Lincoln’s new Navigator concept features Tesla’s Falcon Wing doors, which is simply inaccurate and I expects people will make a bad habit of it.
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In an interview with TechCrunch’s Matt Burns, Faraday Future SVP Nick Sampson had an honest moment and admitted that unveiling the FFZERO1 concept instead of their production car was to get people talking about the company and create a buzz.
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At CES in Las Vegas last night, Volkswagen unveiled its latest all-electric concept vehicle: BUDD-e, a battery-powered microbus. BUDD-e is the first vehicle designed on Volkswagen’s new electric platform called MEB, which is short for Modular Electric Toolkit.

BUDD-e is still an early concept, but the company says that the technology it’s showcasing should give a good idea of VW’s electric vehicles in 2019.
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We were kind of disappointed to learn yesterday that Faraday Future’s first big reveal is a concept race car, which will act as a “test bed” for the company’s technology, and not an early prototype of FF’s first production car.

But it looks like the company released a subtle glimpse of its first production car in the release video of its FFZERO1 concept.
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Electric car startup Faraday Future took its biggest step out of stealth mode tonight by unveiling its first concept car at CES in Las Vegas. As much as we didn’t want it to be true, the leak we publish early in the morning turned out to be correct.

As it turns out, despite Faraday’s short timeline aiming to bring to market its first car in 2017, the company is holding on showing its mass market car, which was only briefly mentioned during the presentation, and instead shows a “test bed” concept to showcase some technology and “design DNA”: the FFZERO1.
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We didn’t want to believe it this morning, but it looks like the concept car we saw in the iOS app leak (see above) is what Faraday Future is about to unveil tonight at CES in Las Vegas.

Nonetheless, the presentation tonight should give us more information about FF’s ownership model and if the concept car is mainly for design cues and showcasing the company’s technology, or if they actually plan on bringing to market something similar.
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We recently wrote about Porter Harris for our piece on SpaceX’s battery development – Tesla is not Elon Musk’s only company developing high-tech battery packs – and also when covering Faraday Future since Harris joined the company as ‘Chief Battery Architect’ in November 2014, but today we learn via his LinkedIn profile (first spotted by Bloomberg) that he left the electric car startup just as it’s about to reveal its first concept.
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Update: we added a video of the app below.

A Twitter user going by supererogatory claims to have leaked the concept Faraday Future plans to reveal later today in Las Vegas. He claims that Faraday accidentally released an iOS app, which was meant for the release of the concept and includes renderings as well as some information about the vehicle, but was quickly pulled from the app store last night.
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An interesting video of the Porsche Mission E surfaced on Reddit this week. It gives us one of the best look of the interior of the concept and the structure of the electric drivetrain.
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Less than 2 weeks away from its big reveal at CES, Faraday Future released today a teaser video hinting at a new car ownership experience for its upcoming long-range electric vehicle.
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It’s no secret that Uber wants to develop its own self-driving car technology, but much like Google, it isn’t clear if the company only wants to develop the technology to be implemented in existing vehicles or go all the way and develop its own car. The ride-sharing company’s latest hire suggest it could be the latter.

We learned that earlier this month, Uber hired veteran automotive designer Richard Donnelly for the role of “Senior Designer” at the company’s Advanced Technology Center.
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Why another electric supercar you ask? You’d think that after Tesla, Rimac, Renovo and the myriad of other companies making high-end electric vehicles, it would reach a point where there’s just too many? The fact of the matter is that the number of electric supercars is still dwarfed by the number of gas-powered supercars.

We are all cheering for more affordable EVs, but until I see more supercars powered by batteries than gasoline, I will not be tired of seeing new super-EVs coming out and this 1 MW concept from Toroidion is “super” alright…
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I thought that Mercedes’ recently unveiled IAA concept was weird-looking, but it has nothing on the German automaker’s new “Vision Tokyo” which it introduced today at the 2015 Tokyo Motor Show.

The concept is equipped with “fuel cell-powered electric drive system”, which consists of an electric motor powered by both a battery pack and pressure tanks of hydrogen with fuel cells.
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France-based automaker Peugeot announced a new electric vehicle concept: the Fractal. The vehicle is only an early concept and the specifications should be taken with a grain of salt. Early renderings show an interesting design for the small 2-door coupé which the company aims at making very light, weighting in at only 1,000 kg (2,205 lbs).
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