Author: Green Car Online News

Faraday Future gets new money from gaming company to build in China, and the US

Faraday Future FF91 prototype
The shame of Faraday Future's financial struggles is that it has what looks to be a viable new electric car, not just on paper, but ready to roll on the road—in prototype form—that may never actually make it to market.

On Sunday, the company revealed a new joint venture with a video-game company in China that could bring it $600 million to build a version of its FF91 in China.

The company will form a joint venture with The9, a Chinese video-game company that launched the first Chinese virtual currency and community in 1999 and once had the exclusive license to operate World of Warcraft in China. It trades on the NASDAQ stock exchange and is reportedly worth $100 million.

READ THIS: With cease-fire agreement, spark flickers toward Faraday's Future

The joint venture aims to produce a new model for the Chinese market based on the FF91, called the V9. The joint company plans to produce up to 300,000 V9s per year for the Chinese market.

In a statement released Sunday, Faraday Future said that The9 will initially invest $5 million, which Faraday Future will use to “overcome its short-term cash flow difficulties and support its ongoing equity financing efforts.”

The balance of the $600 million is dependent on meeting certain investment contingencies.

DON'T MISS: Faraday Future posts “For Sale” signs, as Evergrande backer announces first EV

The company also said the joint venture will help it get the FF91 into production in the U.S.

Faraday Future has a factory in California, where it planned to build the FF91, and had talent from Tesla, Apple, and quite a few automakers to develop the FF91, but it has laid off most of it staff after a funding dispute with its previous backer, Evergrande Health, a large, Hong Kong-based conglomerate intent on getting into the electric-car business. Evergrande also holds a majority stake in National Electric Vehicles Sweden, a Chinese company that builds electric versions of the last Saab 9-3 in China.

CHECK OUT: Faraday Future funder writes its own Saab story

That $2 billion funding deal fell apart in a volley of lawsuits when Faraday Future spent through the first round of funding building running production prototypes of the FF91. The lawsuits were later withdrawn as Evergrande agreed to let Faraday Future seek additional funding from other sources.

The company has since struggled to do so, and The9 represents its first new source of major funding since the $2 billion deal with Evergrande fell apart.

Faraday Future posts “For Sale” signs, as Evergrande backer announces first EV

Faraday Future FF91 prototype
Faraday Future has been selling like crazy lately. Only, not its cars.

The company announced last week that it is seeking a buyer for its original factory site in Las Vegas, where it announced at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show that it would build its future FF91 and FF81. It also announced then that it had sold its Gardena, California, headquarters in a lease-back deal with a real-estate company.

READ THIS: With cease-fire agreement, spark flickers toward Faraday's Future

After introducing the FF91 in Las Vegas in 2017, the company announced that it had bought the 900-acre parcel north of Las Vegas and had broken ground to build a new factory. But Faraday fell on hard times after Chinese authorities began digging into other companies owned by its founder in China and froze his assets.

NEVS 9-3 concept, 2017 CES Asia

By August, the company had abandoned the Las Vegas site and leased a former tire factory in central California to build its cars. Last year the company received a $2 billion lifeline from Hong Kong health insurance conglomerate Evergrande Health, which also holds a majority stake in National Electric Vehicles Sweden (NEVS), the remnants of Saab.

DON'T MISS: Faraday Future factory completes its first full car (Updated)

A year later, the company produced its first running prototype in California—just before a dispute with Evergrande brought the money, and production, to a halt again. The company laid off or furloughed three-quarters of its workforce, including its five founding executives who have automaking experience, and is seeking new investors.

CHECK OUT: Faraday Future funder writes its own Saab story

Citing statements by company spokesman John Schilling as well as real-estate sale documents, The Verge reported that the company sold its Southern California headquarters to real-estate investment group Atlas Capital, and is leasing back the space as it tries to raise money to restart FF91 production at its leased factory in Hanford, California.

In a separate statement at a company summit in China last Saturday, Evergrande announced that it will bring its first electric vehicle to market this coming June. It's unclear whether Evergrande will build a car under its own name, or if it could be referring to the FF91. NEVS already builds electric cars in China based on the last version of the Saab 9-3, which are known as some of the most popular ride-sharing service cars in China.

Electric car battery research pact seeks to keep German auto prowess

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VW Battery Packs
For the past 50 years, the German auto industry has enjoyed quite the roll of growth and success in the U.S., built largely on its expertise with one specific technology: the internal combustion engine.

But now the importance of that advantage is fading, with electric cars on the rise and the highest-value component within them the battery pack.

Increasingly, companies with headquarters in South Korea, Japan, and China—not Germany—have taken the lead not just on cells and chemistry but in the design of modules and sometimes the entire pack architecture. Meanwhile Volkswagen, for instance, has said that it’s currently developing its final platforms focused around internal combustion engines.

DON’T MISS: German automakers commit to massive battery purchases, sidestep some hard realities

Volkswagen and the Swedish battery supplier Northvolt yesterday announced that they have joined forces to conduct research activities that, VW says, “will cover the entire battery value stream—from raw materials through cell technology to recycling.”

2019 Audi e-tron battery pack

The consortium, called the European Battery Union, will also include the manufacturing stage, resulting in “allowing sustainable, climate friendly and competitive battery cell production in the European Union,” states a release from the automaker, noting that the effort “could receive financial support from funding announced by the German government.”

CHECK OUT: VW confirms it’s planning for solid-state batteries by 2025

Germany has already earmarked $1.14 billion to support battery cell production, according to Reuters, with plans to fund a facility aimed at developing the solid-state battery technology that may start to become common in the later part of the next decade.

Joint research done through European Battery Union will start next year and be exchanged across partners. It's not indicated whether there's any limit on the number of partners, but with most such alliances, the more the merrier.

READ MORE: Report: Battery production could offset emissions gains from electric cars

This is in addition to the European Battery Alliance, a project launched by the European Commission in October 2017, with intent to create a competitive and sustainable battery cell manufacturing value chain. The Alliance has estimated that bringing the EU to a lead role in battery-cell manufacturing could create four to five million jobs.

Chevrolet Bolt EV to get electric sibling, with Michigan plant investment

2017 Chevrolet Bolt EV pre-production
General Motors announced on Friday that it will build a second electric car for Chevrolet, alongside the Chevy Bolt EV.

The new model is widely expected to be a somewhat larger crossover SUV, though GM would not confirm that at this point.

MUST READ: Long-range Cadillac SUV to lead GM's next electric-car push, in 3 years

It will share the Bolt's underpinnings, rather than be based on GM's new BEV3 platform, which is expected to go into production with a Cadillac badge sometime after 2021.

In January, the company announced that Cadillac will become its lead electric vehicle brand in an effort to make GM's electric cars profitable by 2023. It can charge more for Cadillacs than for Chevrolets.

Future Cadillac long-range electric large luxury utility vehicle (rendering), 2019 Detroit auto sho

The Bolt EV, the new model, and a new lineup of electric cars on the BEV3 platform are the first-fruits of GM's efforts to transition to building all electric cars as part of its vision, announced in 2017, for a world with “zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero congestion,” as Barra has articulated. “This new Chevrolet electric vehicle is another positive step toward our commitment to an all-electric future,” she said during the announcement Friday.

As part of the new announcement GM said it will invest a $300 million investment in its Orion Township, Michigan, factory where the Bolt is built to add the new model.

READ THIS: Barra blogs again: GM plans to double EV, self-driving investments

The new car was originally expected to be built outside the U.S., but GM CEO Mary Barra said at an event announcing the new vehicle that terms of the new U.S./Mexico/Canada trade agreement encouraged the company to build it in the U.S.

Last month, the company stopped building the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid hatchback, and in January company President Mark Reuss hinted that GM would not develop further hybrid or plug-in models.

CHECK OUT: GM president dashes hopes of future Volt, says no more hybrids

The November announcement that the company would shutter factories and discontinue the Volt and Chevy Cruze, among other models, prompted a public feud with President Trump, who tweeted “all-electric is not going to work.” Last week, he took to Twitter again to demand that Barra “act now” to save 1,500 jobs at the closed Lordstown, Ohio, factory that produced the Cruze.

The investment in Orion township is expected to create 400 new jobs. Meanwhile, the Akron, Ohio, Beacon Journal reported this morning that GM is entertaining offers to sell its “unallocated” Lordstown factory.

BMW plans 12 all-electric models by 2025

Prototype for BMW iNext electric SUV due in 2021
At its annual shareholders meeting in Munich on Wednesday, BMW laid out plans to bring 12 new all-electric cars to market by 2025, including five in the next two years.

Along with the company's existing i3, the first five will include the Mini Electric, due on sale later this year, the iX3 SUV next year, and the i4 sedan and iNext SUV in 2021.

Alongside the 12 electric cars by 2025, the company said it will sell 13 plug-in hybrids, which will include upcoming longer-range plug-in versions of the 3-Series, 7-Series, X3, and X5. It showed the new lineup of plug-in hybrids, which deliver up to 50 miles of electric range, earlier this month at the Geneva auto show.

DON'T MISS: BMW readies battery factory for wave of coming electric vehicles

All told, the company will have more than 10 plug-in and electric models on the market by the end of next year, it said.

With all this electrification, BMW also announced that it will cut its existing drivetrain variants in half. Several BMWs are known for offering virtually every type of mainstream powertrain in a single model, from gas and diesel I-4s, I-6s, and M V-8s, to plug-in hybrids, and soon electrics, with and without all-wheel drive. With electric and plug-in hybrid models, it's much easier to use one or two small engines as range extenders across the lineup and vary the size and output of the battery pack than to depend on those small engines to stand alone in different models.

READ MORE: BMW X3 xDrive 30e builds out plug-in hybrid lineup

The company also gave more details on its upcoming electric-vehicle powertrains, noting that the upcoming iX3 SUV will be the first model to use BMW's fifth-generation electric powertrain architecture, which uses more densely constructed battery packs to save weight and cost and increase capacity.

In September, a supplier demonstrated a 100-kilowatt-hour battery pack that fit into a BMW i3 and delivered 435 miles of range, the same specs BMW has quoted for its iNext electric SUV.

MUST READ: BMW sets up end-to-end battery recycling in Europe

The fifth-generation architecture will also use motors with no rare-earth metals, the company said, making them cheaper and perhaps easier to produce.

BMW recently announced a plan to spend in the neighborhood of $56 million to expand its factory in Dingolfing, Germany, to produce the advanced fifth-generation battery packs, and is investing in a battery supplier system that could produce new cells from those recycled from old BMW battery packs.

CHECK OUT: Supplier tests compact 100-kwh battery pack in BMW i3

The company was an early leader in electric cars, but recently has begun to lag not only Tesla, but other mainstream automakers such as GM and Nissan as it has revamped its electric-car strategy and fallen behind the plans of other European rivals such as Volkswagen.

The new announcement streamlining its internal combustion offerings and expanding electrics may be just what the company needs to put it back in the hunt.

Fisker solid-state batteries won’t arrive until at least 2022

Teaser for Fisker electric SUV
As part of its latest revelation of a new, mainstream electric SUV for 2021, startup automaker Fisker (the eponymous founder's second under his own name), implicitly made a somewhat startling admission: The solid-state batteries the company has been working on may not be ready any time soon.

Founded by Henrik Fisker, the former BMW designer who built the original Fisker Karma (now the Karma Revero, produced by a different company), Fisker originally planned to launch the new company with a super-sedan called the EMotion, which it revealed at the 2018 Consumer Electronics show in January last year.

Henrik Fisker

In July, Mr. Fisker said the car would launch in 2020 with new solid-state batteries that it is developing. “We're actually ahead of where we expected to be,” Fisker told Inc. magazine in an interview at the time. “We have built batteries with better results quicker than we thought.”

READ THIS: Fisker slots $40k electric SUV ahead of delayed EMotion flagship

In its announcement last week, the company put all those plans off in favor of launching a more conventional $40,000 electric SUV to take on the Tesla Model Y in 2020—using conventional lithium batteries with a liquid electrolyte.

Fisker EMotion

At the CES in January 2018, Fisker originally said that the company would launch the EMotion first with conventional batteries before its proprietary solid-state cells were ready and would update the battery pack later in the car's production run once the solid-state cells were ready.

Fisker received an unspecified investment in the technology from heavy-equipment-maker Caterpillar in October.

READ MORE: Fisker gets Caterpillar investment for solid-state battery tech

By announcing that its new so-far-unnamed SUV will use conventional batteries, the company looks to be backtracking on Mr. Fisker's July claim that the batteries will would go into a production car in 2020—apparently implying that the batteries won't be ready.

It's not clear whether the delay is due to cost, production capability, or some other factor affecting the batteries.

Fisker flexible solid-state battery material

In an email to Green Car Reports, Mr. Fisker said: “The business decision we made was not to launch the EMotion with current tech, as we feel that the low-volume, flagship EMotion needed to carry the absolute top-of-the-line, future-forward technology (the Fisker Solid-State Battery most of all).

“We will launch the EMotion, with Fisker Solid-State Batteries, when the batteries are fully primed, tested, and ready for commercialization/vehicle application. This is not a process that can be taken lightly with a brand new technology.

“The batteries are being aggressively developed … within our labs at Fisker. We are on track to commence testing in vehicles with partners next year. This is a brand new technology that’s never been commercialized or introduced—and … initial timelines have always been targets.”

DON'T MISS: Henrik Fisker is latest to claim solid-state battery breakthrough (Updated)

Solid-state batteries promise better safety than conventional lithium batteries with greater resistance to thermal meltdown and fires, as well as higher energy density and faster charging. The challenges with most solid-state designs have been power output, cold-weather capability, and potentially manufacturing challenges.

Fisker's solid-state battery team is led by Fabio Albano, a co-founder of former Michigan-based solid-state battery startup Sakti3, which was acquired by vacuum maker Dyson, which has its own plans to launch electric cars.

CHECK OUT: Fisker EMotion: here's why we're skeptical about Fisker's latest electric car

Other, larger automakers such as Toyota and Volkswagen have also announced plans to produce electric cars with solid-state batteries, but say they won't come until the mid-2020s. Now it looks like Fisker could be joining them. Even Dyson plans to launch its first car in 2021 with conventional lithium batteries.

In Monday's announcement, Fisker said the rollout of the EMotion would come sometime after 2021.

VW sold twice as many diesels in 2018 as in 2017

Volkswagen turbodiesels await their fate near Pikes Peak International Raceway in Colorado Springs
Volkswagen is scrambling to convert its business to building electric cars from building internal combustion cars to building electrics. But it hasn't put diesels behind it.

According to a report by VW itself, orders for its diesel vehicles rose from 39 percent of its products in 2017 to 43 percent in 2018, and that goes double for private customers versus fleet orders. With sales of 10.8 million cars worldwide in 2018, that amounts to 4.6 million diesels sold in 2018.

MUST READ: VW says it is now developing its last generation of gas, diesel engines

Among VW's retail customers, 27 percent ordered diesels versus 15 percent in 2017, the company said.

Although VW announced last year that it was in the process of designing its last internal combustion engines—expected to hit the market in 2026 and to last another 10 years beyond that—it is still heavily dependent on its older stable of gas and diesel engines as it begins the transition to electric cars.

Volkswagen MEB platform architecture

Volkswagen announced last week that it plans to increase its investment in electric cars with a second wave of models based on its upcoming “affordable” MEB electric-car platform, saying it now plans to build 70 new electric models by 2030, and a total of 22 million electric cars, up from its earlier plan for 50 new models and 15 million cars.

The company previously announced that it is investing $50 billion in the transition to electric vehicles, and is converting two of its main factories in Germany to build electric cars. It is also launching a new division in Europe to sell cleaner electric power to its EV-driving customers (and others.)

DON'T MISS: VW boosts electric car plans with more models, 22 million EVs in 10 years

To support those investments, though, it will need to continue selling internal combustion cars, including diesels. “In Germany, the diesel debate is emotionally charged—and frequently strays from the facts,” said Volkswagen Brand Board Member for Sales, Jürgen Stackmann in a company statement. “Given its high efficiency and its performance and in light of climate change, the diesel engine will remain an important technology for years to come, especially for those who travel long distances.”

Volkswagen's diesel engines have been embroiled in the largest emissions cheating scandal, in which it recalled 11 million cars worldwide, and which has cost the company $25 billion in fines in the U.S. alone. Following the scandal, however, Volkswagen diesels have been shown to be complaint with emissions laws where they are sold.

h/t CCM951

Tesla Model 3 Mid Range disappears from automaker’s lineup

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