Faraday Future is an electric vehicle startup based in California. It was founded and it is being primarily financed by Chinese billionaire Jia Yueting.
Founded only in 2014, the company already has around 1,000 employees and reportedly raised 100s of millions.
It started construction on a $1 billion electric vehicle factory in North Las Vegas and plans to bring its first vehicle to market with the next 2-3 years.
Despite highly publicized financial and legal troubles both before and after its big reveal at CES last month, it seems like Faraday Future is still alive and moving forward with its electric vehicle factory in Nevada.
A state official recently disclosed that the company invested $160 million in the factory, but they currently have little to show for after that sizeable investment.
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Faraday Future’s big unveiling of its first production-intent vehicle at CES last month was tainted by several lawsuits and financial issues leading up to it. It got so bad that there were strong doubts about the company even being able to bring the car to production.
It now looks like FF is still aiming to bring it to production, but we learn that it is downsizing what was previously supposed to be a massive $1 billion electric vehicle factory to manufacture the vehicle in North Las Vegas.
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A lot has been said about Faraday Future leading to the unveiling of its first production-intent vehicle at CES earlier this month and since, but the price range of the all-electric vehicle has so far been elusive and the company has never confirmed it.
Jia Yueting, CEO of LeEco and Faraday Future’s main backer, gave us our best idea of the price this week by saying that will cost “less than $300,000”.
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In this week’s top stories: Tesla CEO Elon Musk shares some thoughts on the upcoming Trump administration, Tesla Model 3 could soon be the most American made car, Chargepoint shows us its new 400kW charging station at CES 2017 in Las Vegas, and Ford, Faraday Future and others unveil their latest EVs and concepts at the show.
We’ve already laid out our thoughts concerns with Faraday Future and its just announced FF91. The company’s got an uphill battle getting to production and it is hard to imagine how much this will car cost if/when it comes to market.
On one side, you’ve got tons of goodies and crazy styling with will add tons of cost. But the actual test car that can be driven actually looks kind of tame and the differences from the Model X are a lot more muted. That same Model X has been on sale for a year and the production model is only a hair slower than this Faraday FF91 prototype.
The ‘fastest electric car’ moniker that Faraday keeps throwing around is also a bit of a facepalm. If these were in production or even anywhere close, they might be able to say that but as prototype concepts, this thing is in the same class as the faster Rimac Concept one which is actually shipping. Heck, someone threw a beast of an electric engine in a rear wheel drive ’68 Mustang and got a sub-2 second 0-60 – so let’s lay off that talk.
But for now let’s just admire what this company has put together and maybe the bigger picture of what can be accomplished with an electric powertrain. Here’s a good look at that from YouTuber Marques Brownlee:
Faraday Future has just announced in a post on the company’s facebook page that they’ve received a total of 64,124 reservations globally for their FF 91 within the first 36 hours. They did not specify the proportion of “standard” free reservations to $5,000 “priority” reservations, but we can assume that a vast majority of these reservations are of the free variety.
Faraday Future announced their impressive-but-expensive-seeming 2018 production-intent FF 91 concept car two nights ago at CES. You can see our writeup of the reveal here. See how Faraday’s reservation numbers compare against some other EVs below the jump.
Faraday Future has just finished revealing their first car, the “FF 91”, in a livestreamed demonstration from CES 2017, and boy was the demonstration a doozy.
The FF 91’s specs are incredibly impressive. With a 130kWh battery, it will have 1050 horsepower, which Faraday Future claims is the most of any electric car (but actually falls short of the Rimac Concept_One by 38hp) and 378 miles of EPA range. The 200kW DC charging system purportedly charges the car at a rate of 500 miles of range per hour (and a 15kW AC home charging system for 50% charge in 4.5 hours), and the car will include self-driving capability courtesy of a 3D LIDAR system embedded in the center of the hood.
See more about the specs and presentation, and some photos, below the jump.
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Faraday Future’s unveiling livestream hasn’t even started yet, and already the link to reserve a car has gone live on their website (edit: post updated with the first image available of the car, from the livestream). The website mentions “priority reservations” which require a fully refundable deposit of $5,000, which then makes you eligible to upgrade your reservation to an “Alliance Edition” spot when that is announced in the spring.
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We’re here, for better or worse, this is Faradays put up or shut up moment. We’ll be doing the play by play.
The Venue is pretty swank, it looks like people flew overnight to get here:
I am here at the faraday future event. Everyone is PUMPED pic.twitter.com/Gavk5W8UAD
— Seth Weintraub (@llsethj) January 4, 2017
The countdown has stopped and the music just got louder so something, anything has to happen…soon, right?
There’s a “reserve now” link which is live on the website
5k deposit, refundable, upgradeable to an “FF 91 alliance edition” which is limited to 300 units or you can do a ‘standard reservation’ with no money down and non-priority spot. The standard preorder literally just takes a button click and an email account on the site
Show begins in 1 minute (6:12PM PT)
6:15: Nick Samson recap time. very dramatic. 1400 Employees from 36 countries. MAke life better for the generations to come.
Some big words no cars yet tho…
1st look at the car:
Some charging specs:
200kw* DC charging (vs. Tesla’s current 145kW)
peak charge rate is 500 miles per hour
130kWh of battery life
370 miles of EPA range (LA to Silicon Valley with miles to spare) 400 miles at 55mph
1050 horsepower
0-60- 2.44 secs.
(livestream is up, embedded below)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y8hUf0Np6k
(refresh for the latest)
There’s some confusion around the relationship between Faraday Future and LeEco’s LeSee electric car division beyond the fact that they were both founded by Jia Yueting. They are both separate companies – FF is based in the US and LeSee in China, but the technology behind LeSee’s electric sedan has been developed by Faraday.
It’s a similar arrangement as the joint-ventures US automakers have with Chinese companies in order to produce vehicles in the country. There have been doubts about Faraday Future or LeSee’s ability to bring any vehicle to market after financial issues.
Faraday Future had to delay work at its own factory in Nevada, but now LeEco announced this week that it broke ground at its $3 billion electric car factory in China.
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While the controversy surrounding its financial situation is the main subject of conversation around Faraday Future (FF) at the moment, the company is still moving ahead with the endless teasing of its first production-intent electric vehicle.
It has now released the first images of the interior of the concept.
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Two of Faraday Future’s most senior executives have left the company this week following reports of financial troubles at the electric car startup and just ahead of its upcoming unveiling event in CES next month. While the company doesn’t have an official CEO, it was listing eight top executives on its website. Two of them, Marco Mattiacci and Joerg Sommer, quit this week, according to sources inside the company, and we are told that Chinese billionaire and the main investor of Faraday Future, Jia Yueting, has virtually taken over the company.
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Last week, Faraday Future released a drag race video showcasing its upcoming electric crossover against a Bentley Bentayga, a Ferrari 488 GTB, and a Tesla Model X P100D with the Ludicrous battery upgrade. The company claimed that its vehicle was faster than all those cars, but if you looked closely in the video, a Tesla Model S was in the background.
Sure enough, the startup now released another video claiming that its prototype is quicker than the Tesla Model S P100D’s 2.5 seconds 0 to 60 mph time.
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Last weekend, we published an article advising Faraday Future’s backer, Chinese billionaire Jia Yueting, to bail out the company ahead of its production-intent electric vehicle unveiling in a few weeks.
It was prompted by several recent lawsuits from suppliers claiming that they haven’t been paid in months and insider information suggesting that the startup is in debt to the tune of hundreds of millions. We have contact with one such organization ourselves that says they’ve stopped working with Faraday because of lack of payment. We’re not worried they will find out who because many of their suppliers are in the same boat. The company refused to comment on any these reports, but yesterday they went on a Twitter rant dismissing the financial issues as “skepticism and negativity.”
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Let’s put this out there first: Faraday Future is not “vaporware.” This comes up every time we mention the company, and it’s simply not accurate. There’s no doubt that they are over-hyping their products for a company at this stage of development, but they also have over 1,000 employees–most of them engineers–working on real electric vehicle technologies, and that’s not vaporware.
We have reported on some top talent from Tesla, Apple and more traditional automakers going to the startup. Most of the power electronic team of the GM EV1 went to Faraday Future. All those people are developing real tech. It’s dismissing to call their work “vaporware,” but some clear mismanagement at the top is certainly putting their work at risk, and that’s a real problem for the EV industry.
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As we reported earlier this week, Faraday Future has been teasing a drag race video showcasing its upcoming electric crossover in drag races against a Bentley Bentayga, a Ferrari 488 GTB, and a Tesla Model X P100D with the Ludicrous battery upgrade.
The automaker has now released the video showing the end of each race and is claiming to have beaten the segment-leading 0 to 60 mph time of the Model X P100D.
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Faraday Future can’t stop and apparently won’t stop teasing the unveiling its upcoming electric car. After releasing 3 teaser images over the last week, the company today launched a new version of its website with an interactive rendering of its electric car being gradually unveiled.
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Another day, another teaser. Faraday Future is sure trying to create some hype for its upcoming electric car unveiling at CES next month, but the teasers are starting to make us nervous. With almost every automaker lobbying to reduce fuel consumption standards in order to slow down electric vehicle production, we are placing a lot of hope in new electric vehicle startups not encumbered by an existing gas-guzzling vehicle business that they are trying to protect.
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We are currently witnessing an interesting trend in electric vehicle technology. For a long time, Tesla has been mostly alone in producing battery packs for electric vehicles using thousands of individual cylindrical li-ion battery cells in each pack. In contrast, established automakers, like Nissan with the LEAF or even GM with the more recent Chevy Bolt EV, have been using fewer but larger prismatic cells to build their electric vehicle battery packs.
The strategy is believed to be an important part of the reason why Tesla has been able to deliver much larger battery packs at a more reasonable cost than others in the industry. The company had an 85 kWh pack in 2012 while the next best is GM’s 60 kWh Bolt pack released only this year. But now new entrants in the electric vehicle market seem be following Tesla’s lead instead of more established automakers.
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After releasing a teaser yesterday for its first production-intent electric car ahead of a planned unveiling at CES next month, Faraday Future has unveiled a second teaser today – this time revealing that the vehicle doesn’t have side-view mirrors, but cameras instead.
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Electric vehicle startup Faraday Future will try to redeem itself at CES next month after disappointing EV enthusiasts at the same event last year by unveiling the shell of a concept car after much hype. This time, the company promises to unveil its first production-intent electric car, and they released the first teaser today.
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Electric vehicle startup Faraday Future has been having some significant setbacks recently and now confirmed that it stopped construction at its EV factory in North Las Vegas. While its future looks bleaker than a few weeks ago, we shouldn’t count them out too soon since it just secured more financing.
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While Formula E’s electric race car platform is still arguably in the experimental phase and not enough subsystems can be modified, the championship certainly appears to be moving in the right direction. We recently learned that McLaren will soon supply them with a new battery pack technology with the help of Lucid Motors and it should double the energy capacity of the vehicles, as well as help the overall performance.
Several serious automotive companies, like Renault, Citroen, Mahindra, Jaguar, Audi are already involved in the championship, as well as a few newcomers like NextEV and Faraday Future. The latter released today the specifications of their own Formula E electric race car.
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It’s not like one more weird marketing move makes a difference at this point. Faraday Future already has a few of those under its belt in the short time since its inception just two years ago, but I think this one takes the cake.
As we reported last week, FF is set to unveil its first production-intended car at CES in January, but this week the EV startup decided to release the first official image of the car and it left the camouflage on…
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