Despite its many setbacks over the last few years, Faraday Future claims that it is now flush with money and still plans to launch the FF91, its first electric vehicle, by the end of the year.
The startup now teases a new fleet of prototypes ahead of the launch.
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We have all said that despite all its issues, Faraday Future did develop a pretty cool electric vehicle.
With a 130kWh battery pack configuration, FF claims that the FF91 will have 1050 horsepower. Faraday Future says this is the most of any electric car (but actually falls short of some hypercars like the current Rimac Concept_One and now some other upcoming electric cars) and has 378 miles of EPA range.
Last year, it also set a new “production” EV record at Pike’s Peak – beating the previous year’s Tesla P90D by 20+ seconds.
We have been seeing a few beta prototypes of the car over the last year and we even saw a pretty cool side-by-side with the Tesla Model X, but now FF has a few more beta prototypes ready for a new round of testing.
They wrote last week:
“Our growing fleet of beta cars is ready to be deployed to testing grounds for system refinement and calibration as we keep pushing FF 91 to the limit.”
Here’s a video of the beta cars:
That was filmed at the company’s headquarters in Southern California.
Faraday Future took one of the prototypes up north for some winter driving tests and released a few pictures:
The company still claims that the vehicle will come out by the end of this year despite major changes in its manufacturing plans.
As we previously reported, FF originally announced plans to build a $1 billion electric car factory in Nevada in 2016 and it received a $300 million incentive package in order to build the factory.
The company ended up not doing a lot more than moving some dirt around on the land it acquired and finally abandoned the plan last year while it was running out of cash.
They instead bought an old tarp manufacturing facility in a farm town between Los Angeles and San Francisco and announced plans to convert it into a high-tech electric car factory.
Now, they reportedly raised about $1 billion from undisclosed investors and they say they are ready to make the car a reality this year.
Electrek’s Take
As I previously said, I know it’s hard to take FF seriously at this point, but if they truly managed to raise $1 billion in December, it means that they are certainly not out of the game.
I also think that there’s a lot to like about the FF91. It feels like one of those concept EVs that legacy automakers unveil at auto shows all the time but never end up bringing to production. It looks like Faraday is actually trying to make that car.
But there might be a good reason why they never really build those cars.
There have been tons of rumors about the price of the FF91 if it ever makes it to market. We have heard anything from $100,000 to $300,000.
It’s clear to me that at the lower end of that spectrum, the vehicle could definitely find a decent market in the low tens of thousands of units, but it’s basically dead-on-arrival at the higher end of that spectrum.
I suppose we will have a better idea by the end of the year… or maybe not.