- Faraday Future, a California-based electric vehicle startup, showed off a prototype version of its FF 91, which was built at its factory in Hanford, California.
- The company says production of the car will begin in the third quarter of this year, but it’s worth noting that the company has missed claimed production dates more than once in the past five years.
- Faraday Future has had a tumultuous history, including the resignation of its founder and his declaration of personal bankruptcy in 2019.
Does the name Faraday Future ring a bell? In 2017, the Los Angeles-based electric startup revealed the FF 91 crossover at the Consumer Electronics Show and claimed production would begin in 2018. Five years later, the FF 91 has yet to hit public roads, being upgraded. away while Faraday Future struggled with financial issues. . But Faraday Future is still kicking, apparently. The company revealed last week that it had built its first FF 91 “production intent”. If Faraday Future is to be believed – and we’re not entirely sure that’s the case – production is “in the deadlines” to begin in the third quarter of 2022.
With Faraday Future having been away from the spotlight for so long, an encore is in order. The company was founded in 2014 by Chinese businessman Jia Yueting in California. In 2015, the company announced that it would build a factory in North Las Vegas, Nevada. By the time the FF 91 – which was to come to life at this factory – was unveiled in 2017, the financial troubles had already begun. There was reports of accumulating debts, lawsuits from suppliers and the assertion by former employees that Faraday Future was in fact two companies, with a separate entity created in the Cayman Islands holding the intellectual property of Faraday Future. Founder Jia had also created another competing electric vehicle company, the LeEco LeSee, which insiders said was embezzling funds and talent from Faraday Future, despite other sources claiming the LeSee was never a real one. car (it still hasn’t materialized).
In July 2017, a Chinese court frozen $182 million in assets owned by Jia, his wife and LeEco subsidiaries, and a few days later Faraday Future announced plans for a factory north of Las Vegas had been sabotaged. In August, Faraday Future signed a lease for a former Pirelli tire factory in Hanford, California, and a year later Faraday Future sold a 45% stake to Evergrande Group, a Chinese real estate developer incorporated in the Cayman Islands, for $854 million. But two months later, Evergrande pulled out of the deal and Faraday Future began mass layoffs and pay cuts. In 2019, Jia filed for personal bankruptcy with over $3 billion in debt and stepped down as CEO. Things quieted down at Faraday Future until 2021, when the company went public on the Nasdaq stock exchange via a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company — the same strategy used by startup Lucid Motors.
Faraday’s future
Throughout the financial turmoil, Faraday Future continued to promise the arrival of the FF 91. In 2018, the company said it had built a pre-production prototype at the Hanford factory and said that production would begin in 2019. Now Faraday Future says it has built a “production intent” FF 91 at Hanford. According to a Faraday Future spokesperson, the latest FF 91 vehicle features a new instrument panel, front and rear consoles and exterior lighting intended for production. There are also new exterior badging, a new roof-mounted production lidar assembly and production paint applied in the Hanford factory paint booth.
Specifications for the FF 91 remain unchanged from the 2017 reveal. Three electric motors, two in the rear and one in the front, deliver a claimed 1050 horsepower to all four wheels. Faraday Future claims a zero-to-60-mph time of under 2.4 seconds for the crossover, which is 206.9 inches long, just short of the length of a 2022 Mercedes-Benz S-Class. 130.0 kWh battery, which Faraday Future says will provide a range of 378 miles on the EPA test cycle.
Given Faraday Future’s financial history, we take this most recent announcement with many, many grains of salt. If the FF 91 reaches production by the end of this year, a six-figure price tag is expected, putting it in competition with the Tesla Model X and Lucid Motors’ Air. The top model FF 91 Futurist Alliance, according to the company, will cost over $200,000, will be limited to 300 units and aims to fight Bentley, Rolls-Royce and Maybach. The Hanford plant will start with an annual volume of 10,000 units, with the possibility of expanding to 30,000 vehicles per year, should things ever reach that point.
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