Faraday Future

Electric vehicle startup Faraday Future confirms the long-rumored financing round that saved the company last year.

The California-based startup now announces that it closed $2 billion in financing to bring its electric vehicles to market.
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We first revealed the existence of Evelozcity, an electric vehicle startup founded by former Faraday Future (FF) executives, a few months ago and it might already be a $1 billion company.

The startup now claims to have raised ~$1 billion to bring its electric vehicles to market.
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Despite its many setbacks over the last few years, Faraday Future claims that it is now flush with money and still plans to launch the FF91, its first electric vehicle, by the end of the year.

The startup now teases a new fleet of prototypes ahead of the launch.
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Despite its production plan for the all-electric SUV FF91 falling apart over the last year, Faraday Future claims that it can still bring the vehicle into production by the end of the year.

The company appears so confident that it now even teases future vehicles this week.
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Only a few weeks after we first revealed the existence of Evelozcity, an electric vehicle startup founded by former Faraday Future (FF) executives, FF announced that they filed a lawsuit against them for alleged theft of trade secrets.
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Jia Yueting (YT), founder of LeEco and now CEO of Faraday Future (FF) was placed on a debt blacklist in China and asked to return home to face his creditors following financial issues. Now, he says that he needs to stay in the US to oversee the current fundraising round of his electric car startup.
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Over the past few months, things appeared to be out of control at the high-profile electric car startup Faraday Future. The new leadership brought in by billionaire founder Jia Yueting, including Stefan Krause, former BMW and Deutsche Bank CFO, and BMW’s head of EVs, Ulrich Kranz, along with several other high-profile employees, left in masses.

Now, sources have told Electrek that those same Faraday Future expats are launching their own electric car startup.
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It feels like Faraday Future, once a well-funded electric car startup with over 1,000 employees, has been fading away over the last few months.

Now it looks like the end is near as the company loses several members of its top leadership again.
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Faraday Future recently had one of its first good news in a while when it announced that it is moving into an existing factory instead of building its own in the middle of the desert.

It was seen as a more feasible approach to bring its first electric car to market.

But it looks like FF is still trying to figure out its whole business model as it sent out a survey to its followers for them to help “shape key aspects of their business.”
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After having abandoned (officially put on hold) its massive $1 billion electric vehicle factory in Nevada, Faraday Future is now announcing a new less ambitious factory to bring its electric car to market.

The new facility is in Hanford, California – roughly halfway between Los Angeles, where FF is based, and Silicon Valley. 
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After months of financial difficulties stalling the project, electric vehicle startup Faraday Future issued a statement today announcing that they are abandoning their $1 billion EV factory in Nevada… for now.
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Everywhere you look, EV records keep improving.  Our newest example is Faraday Future’s FF 91, which took on the Pike’s Peak International Hill Climb this weekend and shattered the previous record for a “production” EV, set last year by a stripped but otherwise mostly unmodified Tesla P90D.  The FF 91 beat the Tesla’s time by over 20 seconds, setting a time of 11:25.083.

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The Pikes Peak International Hill Climb has somewhat become a proving ground for electric vehicles over the years. A Tesla Model S set a new record for a production electric vehicle, Rimac also did an impressive job with its all-electric 1.1 MW monster racecar, and several all-electric bikes also made good impressions.

Now Faraday Future is trying to position its new FF91 has a top performance all-electric car and it is currently at Pikes Peak to prove it.
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While Faraday Future’s future is unclear as it attempts to raise a significant round of financing after its main backer, Jia Yueting from LeEco, is having liquidity issues, the FF91, the company’s first production-intent vehicle, is still very real and going through its test program.

This week, the electric car started showcased its dynamic vehicle control and announced that it will test it at the upcoming Pikes Peak International Hill Climb.
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Faraday Future’s troubles intensified over the past few months and as we reported earlier this week, it resulted in dozens of employees jumping ship.

Nonetheless, the company is apparently still investing in its factory under construction in Nevada, where its investment has now reached $174 million, though at a slower pace.They are now reportedly trying to raise a $1 billion round to complete the construction.
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When Faraday Future first set up its electric vehicle development effort in 2014 and ramped it up in 2015 and 2016, it was a strain on Tesla’s team since it poached literally dozens of engineers from the electric automaker. 

Now it’s going the other way around as dozens of Faraday Future employees have been jumping ship as things are becoming gloomy at the company. 
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Faraday Future’s all-electric FF91 has been dubbed a classic electric “weird-mobile” by a lot of people. A term that might have originated from Tesla CEO Elon Musk referencing the way some automakers are designing EVs to specifically look “weird”.

I tend to agree based on the prototypes that FF unveiled in January, but we now get to see a matte black beta prototype, which definitely looks more badass than the silver and white prototypes with camouflage that Faraday showed before.
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Several companies developing electric vehicle and self-driving technologies have used Tesla’s vehicles, whether it was to reverse engineer them, like Audi did with the Model X, or to work on new sensors and autonomous driving technologies, like Bosch did with a Model S for its self-driving program.

Now Faraday Future is using a Model X as part of its test program for its own electric and autonomous vehicle.
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Like Governor’s Office of Economic Development (GOED) did for Tesla’s Gigafactory last week, they released the quarterly report for Faraday Future’s own electric vehicle factory project in the state.

As of the last reported quarter (Q4 2016), the company reportedly made a $160 million capital investment in the project, but the only result so far is a lot of dirt being moved around.
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Nevada State Treasurer Dan Schwartz has been a strong opponent of the deal that brought electric vehicle maker Faraday Future to the state. He went as far as calling it a “Ponzi scheme.”

Schwartz is turning up the scrutiny on the company and dragged Tesla into it by calling for an audit of the deals they made with Governor’s Office of Economic Development (GOED).
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Before even unveiling its first car, Faraday Future had shown an impressive ability to attract top talent, but a few of them recently left the electric vehicle startup. They have been losing quite a few high-profile executives since financial and legal problems came to light over the past few months.

Nonetheless, they appear to have kept the ability to attract new top talent since we now learn that Stefan Krause (54), the former CFO of BMW and Deutsche Bank, is joining the company to lead its finance team.
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