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Starting a car company is not only very, very hard—as Tesla, Fisker, and many others testify—but requires breathtaking sums of money.
Now struggling Faraday Future, the electric-car startup firm whose entrepreneurial Chinese backer is facing legal action in his home country, appears to have found a well-heeled savior.
The new investor is reportedly a Hong Kong-based investor who has so far provided $550 million to the company, of a planned $1.5 billion.
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That news is according to a report Tuesday by Business Insider attributed to “a source with knowledge” of the company’s financial dealings.
Faraday issued a press release describing the opening yesterday of its first global supplier summit in Los Angeles.
At that event, it said, FF founder Jia Yueting welcomed representatives from more than 100 different companies vying to supply components to the startup luxury electric car maker.
In the same release, Faraday said its first product, the FF 91 revealed at the January 2017 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, would go on sale by the end of this year.
The company’s assembly plant in Hanford, California, the replacement for a billion-dollar facility in North Las Vegas that is now on hold, will “begin to come online” this quarter, FF said.
READ THIS: Faraday Future, short on cash, leaves Formula E electric-car race series (Aug 2017)
The company updated the assembled suppliers on its plans and funding, hoping that they would “walk away with renewed confidence,” which its supply-chain head Pablo Ucar said he felt it had achieved.
Suppliers at the event included Korean battery company LG Chem, German parts maker Bosch, various Japanese companies including Fuji Technical and Miyazu, and U.S. lidar maker Velodyne, among others.
wireframe of possible Faraday Future production vehicle, from company promotional video at CES 2016
Meanwhile, as Business Insider notes, Faraday plans to launch a second electric car—this one a smaller crossover utility vehicle to be called the FF 81—for the Chinese market.
That vehicle is likely to debut at this year’s Beijing auto show, to be held in the second part of April.
CHECK OUT: Bowing to inevitable, Faraday Future scales back plant plans (Feb 2017)
While the FF 91 will carry a six-figure price, the FF 81 will be more affordable, according to a “source with knowledge of [its] product timeline.”
Chinese regulators are pursuing FF’s founder, Jia, over allegations of unpaid debts from companies he owned in China that total hundreds of millions of dollars.