Heard of Faraday Future?
Probably not.
The “Tesla competitor” debuted in 2015, featuring “a star-studded cast of top executives from Tesla, Audi, Lamborghini, BMW, Ferrari, Volkswagen, Ford, and Google”.
There was the billion-dollar factory promised in Nevada that received a hefty tax break (which never materialized).
There was the bizarre futuristic FFZERO1 concept car which was neither a design study nor a production model (and now sits in the Petersen Museum).
They even promised to release a tri-motor vehicle faster than a Tesla (the Tesla quickly beat it with a software upgrade).
Then their founder started a rival car company, went bankrupt in China, hid out in California, and was kicked off the board.
Despite being founded in 2014 (it’s now 2022) Faraday promises to have a production car built in their Hanford, CA plant by the end of 2022 (originally 2020).
That was in February 2022.
3 months later, it was revealed the “14,000 reservations” that Faraday boasted of were actually “14,000 unpaid indications of interest” – and Faraday only had 401 refundable deposits for their crossover, now set to be over $200k.
In 2018, Jalopnik’s Erik Shilling ranked Faraday as slightly more likely to build a production electric car than rival Lucid, and again in 2020.
In 2022, Lucid has a production electric vehicle for sale, with the first set of reservations already sold out.
40 minutes south of this very real Lucid for sale is the Faraday Future Factory in Hanford, CA, where a single production model for sale has yet to roll off the line.
Maybe next year.
