A California-based electric car manufacturer named after a towering scientific genius from the nineteenth century, mobilizing to disrupt the auto industry. You guess it - Faraday Future, a 400-person company based in Gardena, CA (a Los Angeles suburb), led by former executives and designers from Tesla and the electric car operations of BMW and General Motors. Nick Sampson, the former Director of Chasis Engineering at Tesla (he left in the company in 2012) is now Senior Vice President at Faraday Future, while Richard Kim from BMW and Porsche heads up design.
Sampson confirmed that the vehicles under development will be 100 percent electric, and may include some autonomous driving functions (Tesla reportedly has similar plans). The company's business model could be a hybrid of product (like Tesla) and service (Uber); for the latter, the cars could drive themselves to customers, and then presumably be driven manually or automatically.
Chinese billionaire Jia Yueting is reportedly bankrolling the company via the media company Leshi Internet Information & Technology; a Leshi executive named Chaoying Deng has been installed as Faraday's CEO. Faraday is reportedly ready to invest $1 billion in a factory, with locations in California, Georgia, Louisiana and Nevada under consideration. The company hopes to put its first vehicle on the market in 2017.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday November 06 2015, @09:37PM
I dare say that if I'd been very rich and crazy in those days I'd have tried to buy one... Or build one in my secret dungeon lab.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].