After months of financial woes and executive upheaval, fledgling California electric-vehicle maker Faraday Future is at last showing signs of scaling down its ambition—just as intrigue builds at its Bay Area rival, Lucid Motors, over a potential buyout from Ford.
Faraday Future has scrapped plans to build a mammoth $1 billion factory in Nevada, and it has reportedly failed to secure another major round of financing in recent months—despite having hired a new chief financial officer, former Deutsche Bank and BMW CFO Stefan Krause, earlier this year. Now the startup has recruited another big name from the Munich automaker: Ulrich Kranz, the former vice president in charge of the BMW i electric-vehicle sub-brand. According to a company release, Kranz initially will be in charge of coordinating resources and focusing “on getting the FF91 to production quickly” [their italics].
At this point, Faraday Future needs to show that it can make its Plan B work. Doing that could include moving production overseas or repurposing an existing smaller facility in the United States, as well as downscaling its operations. The automaker got the hype machine going early with teasers starting in mid-2015, followed by its FFZERO1 supercar concept at the 2016 CES technology show in Las Vegas. Then it previewed the FF91, its production-bound all-electric crossover, with a showy evening event at CES this past January—and even allowed brief rides in the 1050-hp prototype.
Faraday uber-investor Jia Yueting and R&D chief Nick Sampson in a more optimistic time, rolling out the FF91 concept at the 2017 CES tech show in Las Vegas.
Faraday has drawn its primary funding from Jia Yueting, a Chinese tech entrepreneur who is the founder of LeEco, a startup aspiring to be a rival to Netflix, Apple, and even Tesla. Earlier this month, a Shanghai court froze $182 million in assets belonging to Jia. LeEco also recently lost its contract to co-develop the upcoming Aston Martin RapidE.
BMW executive Kranz’s move to Faraday creates another curious parallel with Lucid, which until recently was also linked to Jia. Lucid last year recruited another BMW manufacturing executive, U.S. production manager Brian Barron, as its director of global manufacturing. Lucid is in the midst of its own next round of funding, which it needs in order to start forming a Tesla-style retail network and build a $700 million assembly facility in Arizona. It intends to start making its Air luxury sedan there in 2019.
It may not be a coincidence at all that, just a few weeks after Jia reportedly sold his remaining stake in Lucid, Bloomberg reported that the Menlo Park, California, company is in early-stage takeover talks with Ford. As for Faraday, we’ll soon see whether its austerity plan gives the brand a new life or whether it’s too little, too late.
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