China-backed Faraday Future’s first electric car is a triumph and a disaster

Photo credit: Faraday Future.

It’s been a rough year for Faraday Future. The American electric vehicle startup, backed primarily by Chinese tech billionaire and LeEco founder Jia Yueting, has endured a year of damning reports about everything from its ambitious production plant to its funding and staffing woes. But yesterday, finally, the company revealed its first production car: the FF 91.

It shouldn’t’ come as much of a surprise for anyone who’s followed Jia Yueting’s career that the launch was impressively ambitious while also being kind of a debacle.

They could only look on with embarrassment.

First, the good: the FF 91 is incredible on paper. Faraday Future says it can go from 0-60 mph in just 2.39 seconds, which would make it faster than any Tesla. It also supposedly outranges any Tesla, with a max range of nearly 400 miles on a single charge. And it comes with a ton of smart-car bells and whistles, including facial-recognition for keyless entry, self-parking capabilities, and seats that learn and adapt to the desires of the people who sit in them. It also has a bunch of cameras and LIDAR that ultimately may make it capable of wholly autonomous driving. Faraday Future senior VP of engineering Nick Sampson called the car “the first of a new species.”

Then, of course, there was the bad. When Faraday tried to live demo the self-parking feature, the car didn’t move. Jia Yueting and Nick Sampson, onstage presenting the demo, could only look on with embarrassment. Later, Sampson told reporters that the failure was likely due to the roof of the building inside which the demo took place inhibiting some of the signals the car needed to park.

Photo credit: Faraday Future.

But beyond that, there are other reasons to be skeptical of the future Faraday unveiled yesterday. How much does the market want yet another high-priced electric supercar? Faraday hasn’t revealed final pricing for the FF 91, but given the specs list, it’s hard to imagine the FF 91 finding its way into the garages of regular Joes. It seems to be years behind Tesla, which is already in the process of rolling out its lower-end, mass-consumer-friendly electric cars.

Faraday Future talks a big game about the EV future. “Tomorrow is too important for us, and for humanity. We have to flip the automotive industry on its head,” said Sampson at the event, referring to the need to get the world off of fossil fuel vehicles. But it is difficult to imagine a high-end luxury car that 99.9 percent of the world cannot afford solving any real problems. And it’s hard to imagine Faraday Future will be able to generate much more than hype with this souped-up supercar most people can’t afford to buy.

I’m looking forward to the day when electric vehicle makers like Jia start looking beyond the uber-wealthy demographic and aim to design a car for everyday people. The world has enough high-end electric road monsters. Tesla’s headed in the right direction with the Model 3. Faraday Future, it seems, still hasn’t gotten the memo.

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from Tech in Asia https://www.techinasia.com/chinabacked-faraday-futures-electric-supercar-triumph-disaster
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