Faraday Future Had the Worst Year Possible For an EV Startup (engadget.com) 52
Stop me if you've heard this one before: Faraday Future is almost out of cash. From a report: At the tail end of 2017, the much-hyped EV startup was sliding toward financial oblivion. But then a crucial round of funding from a then-mysterious benefactor gave the team a lifeline. Faraday planned to finish its first car, the FF 91, and start production before 2019. Like Tesla, the company wanted to usher in a new wave of electric, autonomous and "seamlessly connected" vehicles. But unlike its closest rival, Faraday hasn't spent the past year building and shipping transformative cars. Instead, it's been fighting the investor that decided to bail it out.
The beleaguered EV maker was originally saved by a company called Season Smart, which agreed to invest $2 billion, starting with an $800 million payment, in exchange for a 45 percent stake in the company. In June 2018, Season Smart was acquired by Evergrande Health, a subsidiary of a giant property developer in China, for roughly $853 million. Evergrande took control of Season Smart's stake and agreed to pay the remaining $1.2 billion, split into two $600 million chunks, in 2019 and 2020. As part of the updated deal, it took control of Faraday's assets and intellectual property.
For a while, everything seemed OK. Faraday began constructing a long-overdue factory in Hanford, California, where a Pirelli tire factory once stood. The company hoped it could eventually match Tesla's enormous Gigafactory in splendor and efficiency. But there was a problem. By July Faraday had already burned through its initial $800 million payment. To survive, the startup needed more money -- and it couldn't wait until 2019 for another cash injection.
The beleaguered EV maker was originally saved by a company called Season Smart, which agreed to invest $2 billion, starting with an $800 million payment, in exchange for a 45 percent stake in the company. In June 2018, Season Smart was acquired by Evergrande Health, a subsidiary of a giant property developer in China, for roughly $853 million. Evergrande took control of Season Smart's stake and agreed to pay the remaining $1.2 billion, split into two $600 million chunks, in 2019 and 2020. As part of the updated deal, it took control of Faraday's assets and intellectual property.
For a while, everything seemed OK. Faraday began constructing a long-overdue factory in Hanford, California, where a Pirelli tire factory once stood. The company hoped it could eventually match Tesla's enormous Gigafactory in splendor and efficiency. But there was a problem. By July Faraday had already burned through its initial $800 million payment. To survive, the startup needed more money -- and it couldn't wait until 2019 for another cash injection.
STOP (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not news. This is a sob story with a poor headline and a bad summary.
And an editor who just won't edit. All of you, back to editor school. Off you go.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Slashdot has a daily quota of stories that fawn over Tesla. This is a story about not Tesla that tells you how wonderful and successful and transformative Tesla Tesla Tesla Tesla is.
Re: STOP (Score:1)
I think it is a story about a young company. Obviously it has had a wild ride. And too many startups equate investor interest with sweet success. And yet it is all too well known what the consequences are. Is there sunshine yet? Or is it raining now?
A story of reckless debt, and dodging creditors (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that the founder made a habit of borrowing tons of money to start new companies, and is now unlawfully dodging his creditors. The new investors are (rightfully) concerned that his creditors will come after his Faraday Futures stock, which would have given them near control of the company. The creditors want their money, they don't want to run an electric car start-up (that can't makes cars). Therefore they might well decide to liquidate the company's assets.
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Re:STOP (Score:5, Interesting)
The article mentions Tesla twice. Once as the maker of a similar EV, and again as a reference to building a factory. I don't think that's "fawning". It's EV news, and I suppose if you consider EV to be just about Tesla then you probably shouldn't ever read anything about EV. Unfortunately, Tesla is a relatively dominant company in the EV space, so they're going to be mentioned in articles about EV.
FF grabbed a bunch of headlines when they launched making bold, impressive, and pretty hard to swallow claims about how great their EV was going to be. At the time I felt that they were doing a disservice to the EV market because people looked at their vaporware and thought "Why would I buy these shitty EVs on the market when these folks are going to deliver all that 10 times over?". Those who actually knew something about EV were skeptical, but many car buyers don't understand, yet, some of the limits on EV hardware. Turns out, FF really wasn't remotely positioned to deliver on its extensive claims.
The only reason why I'd say it's not worth a headline is that it's no surprise at all that they're still falling on their face.
Re:STOP (Score:4)
That Tesla link is the summary author's work, not the original article. Really you're going to complain about "all the other auto makers that have been developing electric vehicles"? Like who, GM? Or the Leaf? How would that paragraph have read..."Faraday Future, having recently claimed the ability to produce an EV sports car with full autonamous driving, which would occupy an entirely separate marketing niche from Nissan's Leaf, is struggling to produce units or complete their proposed factory. Having hoped to dethrone Nissan as the 2nd best selling EV worldwide, Faraday's hopes seem to be fading."
Faraday Future wasn't trying to compete with the Leaf, or the Smart Car. Mentioning Tesla in an article about FF is appropriate, not spurious.
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I will addend that by agreeing that the Leaf is the best selling EV worldwide through the length of it's production life, even if it's year-over-year sales currently lag behind Tesla.
Nevertheless, FF's own marketing and demographic projection is clearly targeting Tesla, not Nissan, Ford, or anyone else.
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Tesla got a lot of public support because a lot of the public wanted electric vehicles, even if they did not specifically want a Tesla vehicle. Now that the larger manufacturers have finally got on the electric vehicle band wagon, the need to support Tesla has diminished and of course any new comer, get's no special support at all. The big car manufacturers are going to make electric cars, the need to support any particular company in order to promote electric vehicles has diminished.
From 2020 on, electric
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From 2020 on, electric look to on the way to dominating the consumer vehicle market.
No sooner than 2025. There are too many infrastructure issues to work out. If they could work out charging them, EVs would suit the needs of the majority of the population, but as it is, by 2020 they will probably still work for less than half of them. If it's anywhere near half, though, that's still quite a bright future for EVs.
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Start to dominate, not actually dominate but it will be quicker than you think because of higher capacity batteries and home charging. Then add in solar panels and another battery and basically tax free charging. So not necessarily super convenient and they might well have to figure out mobile rescue charging rather than towing, enough charge to get to the nearest charging station. Likely smart petrol station will add metered power points to their car parks. There will be a lot or parked cars with no charge
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"It will end up all quite short, sharp and brutal occuring over not many years. "
This idea ignores the difficulty of actually achieving this. Even putting political issues aside, there are physical reasons it cannot happen that fast. We can't build battery packs, fast charging stations, OR grid improvements that quickly, let alone all three — and all three would be required to meet that schedule. Changes on that scale cannot be made that quickly in general, and there are specific reasons why this part
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Hence the brutality, it will be quite a mess, not in the least a smooth transition. You forget, putting a home power system into your home is not institutional but entirely your choice, same as charging your electric vehicle at home entirely tax free. It will be a pretty chaotic bunch of years. There is not good way through it, and every one will be playing catch up. I think ICE has already made it play as is now losing to full electric, except maybe for commercial vehicles. The short sharp and brutal bit,
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You forget, putting a home power system into your home is not institutional but entirely your choice,
This can only be done so rapidly, though. Most people are incapable of executing it correctly and will be forced to contract assistance. The equipment can only be produced so quickly as well. If everyone decided to install solar tomorrow, there wouldn't be enough hardware. There wouldn't be enough batteries, charge controllers, inverters, panels... And nobody wants to overproduce in idle times, and it takes time to bring on new staff and spin up more production facilities. Inertia.
Depends upon how many major manufacturers make the jump when and if consumers are willing to invest in vehicles that will lose market value based upon the cost of a electric conversion, I wont, my next car will be electric.
I've never bought a new ca
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A more appropriate company would have been Fiskar...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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And an editor who just won't edit. All of you, back to editor school. Off you go.
You're making the fatal assumption that they went to editor school in the first place.
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It was actually a success - mission accomplished (Score:5, Interesting)
https://www.theverge.com/2018/... [theverge.com]
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SUV's that look like SUV's (the G3 especially).
You're kidding right? Is there supposed to be a /s there? I clicked that linked, those tiny things do not look like SUVs. They look like sedans that had an awkward growth spurt.
Hav you been car shopping recently? The G3 looks like every other manufacturers soft SUV/cross-over.
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That's okay, Trump will probably announce financing for coal-powered cars companies pretty soon.
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- They named themselves Faraday.
Instead of being original, they started from the very beginning as a "me too" company. Everything they did was to simply copy Tesla. And they intended to reach a point of competitive product with a version 1 vehicle while racing the clock against an established company like Tesla who has a rain-maker CEO.
- Car that seems to completely lack design
Honestly, the FF vehicle is an absolute mess. Look at it. It's an end-to-e
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The Gigafactory is where Tesla makes batteries is it not?
Tesla makes cars in the former NUMMI plant in Fremont.
Can someone explain why FF would want their car factory to match the splendor of Tesla's battery factory?
Simple answer: to scam more investors. The pitch from YT was “look we can match Tesla, don’t you want to be part of the next Tesla?”. It was an easy way to get people excited and hopefully invest into the company.
Worst possible (Score:2)
There was no meteor strike on the main office, releasing a strain of bacteria that turned their hair blue and caused impotence? Termites didn't evolve a taste for flesh and start drilling into their feet? Global warming didn't atmospherically create a lens that concentrated all the warming right over their office, roasting them like ants? Giant birds of prey didn't swoop and steal parts from their cars in the middle of the night?
(
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GM could buy their assets with a leveraged buyout, then destroy them all EV1 style, then get another bailout from the US government because their green energy investments didn't work out 'through no fault of their own'.