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posted by cmn32480 on Friday November 06 2015, @06:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the elon-musk-is-not-gonna-like-this dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 06 2015, @08:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 06 2015, @08:43PM (#259648)

    Tesla, Leaf, that Beemer thing, all are cutesy niche car at best. What will make them a genuine mass market transporation choice are: 1. better batteries, 2. charging infrastructure.

    Till then, it's all hipster crap.

  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday November 06 2015, @09:13PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Friday November 06 2015, @09:13PM (#259661)

    Most people around the world drive less than 20 miles a day. The objections which are commonly raised to electric cars mostly stem from irrational and essentially outdated notions of "my car has to be be able to", as well as the reluctance to setup pay-the-owner distributed charging stations.

    Anyone with a wad of dough, here is your billion-dollar startup idea (I take only a few % comm for my patent): a geolocated charging box enabled by an app. Park in my driveway and pay me for the real usage of my current.

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 06 2015, @09:30PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 06 2015, @09:30PM (#259668)

      Most people around the world ride buses and shared vans. You're full of shit.

    • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 06 2015, @09:49PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 06 2015, @09:49PM (#259682)

      I too drive less than 20 a day. An electric would probably serve me well *for that exact purpose*.

      Only it fails when I want to visit my parents or my wife's parents. We drive. That is 1200+ miles for each trip (each way). I gave up flying a few years ago. So there you go.

      I am not alone in doing this.

      "oh just own two cars"? Why because you say so? "oh just rent" oh and now I just blew away any savings on the electric.

      For *some* people the use case *you* have works well. For others not so much.

      I would love to get one. But it does not fill a few needs I have. The big one is I drive to my vacations or to visit a friend 300 miles away and then turn around and drive back that day.