Don't Believe The Hype: Faraday Future Will Not Be A Tesla Rival Next Year
It’s not easy to launch a new car brand. You can’t just give it a name, tell people your plans for world domination and then sit back and watch the money roll in. As the likes of Fisker, Cizeta-Moroder and various iterations of TVR will tell you, it just doesn’t work like that.
And yet, as electricity and hydrogen become realistic means of propulsion, it’s not stopping people having a go. We are, of course, talking about Faraday Future, the bright, shiny new brand that’s going to, ahem, ‘reformat’ the automotive industry and be rivalling Tesla as soon as 2018. That’s next year.
We reported some details of the proposed FF91, the company’s first car that aims to beat even the fastest Tesla in the 0-60mph sprint. By all of 0.01 seconds. But a premature claim on an acceleration record isn’t really enough when it comes to making a commercial success of the idea.
Nor is technology that doesn’t work. At CES the automated parking system failed to work on stage, leaving Faraday Future’s Senior Vice President Nick Sampson hanging like a fish on a hook. Awkward. The apparent lack of progress since the car’s original debut to Western journalists back in October, where the system had also failed, should sound an alarm bell or two.
Obvious comparisons are going to be made with Tesla, but according to several reports, it’s likely that even if Faraday Future survives 2017, there just won’t be enough money to pay the bills beyond that, let alone produce the fastest-accelerating car in the world.
Tesla is backed by a man who’s often called a genius, and a corporation with enough money to bankroll the operation…or at least mostly. The company’s recent backtrack on its lifetime free electricity pledge is all the proof you need that even Tesla is struggling to make too much money out of fast electric cars.
Then there’s news emerging via The Register, which seems to reveal that the Chinese man whose money is backing Faraday Future, called Jia Yueting, is having second thoughts. The Faraday project is draining cash faster than it’s being made in his company’s other businesses, which more than likely means terrifying sums of money are involved.
The promised billion-dollar factory in Nevada has apparently been abandoned part-way through construction, with what looks suspiciously like a direct replacement now being built in China. At around the same time, writes The Verge, senior staff began jumping ship from the company. Ding Lei, the company’s effective CEO, decided among others that he’d seen enough. The remaining leaders are staying defiant, it appears, reports Jalopnik.
With all this turmoil in the background it’s difficult to picture a successful future for Faraday, if you’ll forgive the pun. After all, it took Tesla 14 years to get to a point where it can build a reliable, intelligent, part-automated mainstream electric car, and even now the firm is still plagued by odd gremlins. So for Faraday to do it before the end of next year? That’s pure fantasy.
To launch a car or technology brand and make it succeed, you need great ideas, mountains of money and even more patience. In a world where instant is a continuing buzzword, the latter is likely to be in even shorter supply than the cash.
Faraday might be making the headlines in the short term, but don’t bet on a full production FF91 ever being built unless Jia Yueting comes up with new investment and sets the schedule back at least a decade. Will he have the patience? Probably not. Which begs the question: why bother in the first place?
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The main problem is probably money. Faraday Future is sponsored by LeEco (chinese media giant) and LeEco’s ambitions almost led company to bankrupcy few months ago.
The idea is: if your sponsor is at the edge of bankrupcy, so are you. LeEco and FF will survive only if someone invests money in LeEco.
Now, FF’s ambitions are WAY greater than its possibilities.
Oop. Double post.
Absolutely. No one is going to invest in a company with unrealistic goals and a rather dubious financial history with both investors and company men leaving a jumping from a leaking ship.
As soon as the driving valet didnt work i knew they were doomed…
I wonder if the electric car marques will come up with an original name eventually, or we are going to see Kirchhoff, Coulomb, Ampère and Maxwell car brands in the future.
That seems more likely. 😅 I wonder what will happen when all those names are eventually taken. 😅
You forgot Volt and Ohm.
We have Ford, named after Henry Ford. We have Chrysler, named after Walter Chrysler. We have General Motors, which is the least specific name you can come up with. GM has brands named after people who came up with them. Tesla Motors at least named the company after somebody else, whose name was relevant. After all, their cars use AC motors, have fobs, and can be controlled remotely to an extent.
The idea of naming a company after somebody whose name has something to do with electricity is just a rip off of Tesla, at this point, whose name seems more original than these others when you consider how it came about.
Now if only we could do something about Tesla’s pathetic attempt to come up with clever model names. Whoever thought up S (as in Mercedes S class) or X (as in crossover) or 3 (as in 3 series) wasn’t exactly a genius…or if he was, his talent lies elsewhere. I can still remember when cars had model names instead of part numbers.
We should probably start an electric car manufacturer called Diesel.
cue the “shocking” and “electrifying” puns.
I… can’t do it again.
The good news is Faraday is based in Southern California which is on the Mexican border, so when they go full DeLorean it should be easier for smuggling cocaine than Ireland.
Wasn’t all charges against DeLorean dropped due to lack of evidence anything illegal ever happened?
SoCal isn’t right on the Mexican boarder though it starts at the border
That is a few of the problems you’ll face when you look to start up a car company. Jay Leno quoted “first everybody thinks they can build a car, then they try to build a car. Then they try to put it in production but eventually, they fail”. The way Pagani and Koenigsegg managed it was go for unconventional business model which aided them progress their company. By setting ambitious goals which seems almost impossible and uncanny in the real world, it’s very much likely that they’ll fail.
Even as I’m looking forward to startup my own car company, I know some of these problems I have to face and they aren’t going to be small.
Mahfooz Motors ( Insert interrogation symbol here)
Well, that’s why I said this…
Above all, you need A LOT of money to start a car company. Take Koenigsegg as an example. Christian von Koenigsegg inherited a lot of money and built up a successful food importing/exporting business in his early 20s. This built up the capital he needed (likely tens of millions) to start Koenigsegg. But it took about 10 years for the money to roll in - there’s a huge time-delay between money going out and (hopefully more) money going in. Think of it as a gigantic, super-laggy turbo :D.
Hopefully its wastegates wont stuck open :D
https://youtu.be/HA18oyyG-xg
“it took Tesla 14 years to get to a point where it can build a reliable, intelligent, part-automated mainstream electric car” They haven’t made a reliable car yet
A Tesla drove through a flood.
An electric car.
Inside water.
If you don’t see the problem,get in a bath tub and throw a toaster in.
You’re likely to notice water and electricity would tend not to go well together.
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