The race for the fastest, most efficient, luxurious electric car is on! This week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, Faraday Future unveiled its hyped concept car. Joining the ranks of Tesla, Porsche, BMW and other luxurious electric car companies, Faraday differentiates itself in two ways: Its custom platform offers lots of variety in battery size and physical size. Additionally the company is flirting with a novel business model. You wouldn’t buy a Faraday car, you’d buy a subscription: Need a big car today, and a smaller car tomorrow, no problem. The FFZERO1, unveiled at CES looks more like a stealth bomber than a car. It features 1,000 horsepower getting it from 0 to 60 in under three seconds with a max speed of 200 mph, a glass roof, an instrument panel that gathers bio-metric data from the driver and a helmet that feeds the driver water and oxygen, check our video.
As the week progressed at CES rumors circulated that Apple might be behind the super cool prototype…
Was Faraday Future’s grand event here Monday the coming out party for a new heavy hitter on the automotive scene, or a brilliantly conjured smokescreen for existing tech giant Apple?
That delicious morsel of pure conjecture has been circulating almost since Los Angeles-based Faraday sneaked onto the scene in earnest last year, just as rumors of Apple’s interest in building a car gained momentum.
As many reports have noted, Apple has been hiring auto experts at a rapid clip from companies such as Tesla. So has Faraday, whose head of engineering, Nick Sampson, held a similar position at Tesla.
Apple has about $200 billion in cash reserves that it would do well to re-invest wisely, and where better than in the rapidly evolving and tech-driven automotive space. And clearly Faraday must have deep pockets, given that in two years it has hired about 750 auto veterans and, as announced last fall, plans to build a $1 billion manufacturing plant north of here.
That admittedly could be explained away by the fact that Chinese billionaire Jia Yueting and other investors are behind Faraday, news that came out when Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval announced that his state would become the location for Faraday’s new factory.”
