"There are known unknowns," the former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once mused. When it comes to Faraday Future, the electric car company backed in part by Chinese billionare Jia Yueting, a public unveiling at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas has left us with a pile of them.
The biggest piece of information we have on Faraday Future, or FF, as it said on Monday night it'd like to be called, is that the state of Nevada and the city of North Las Vegas take them very seriously. FF got $215 million in tax credits and $120 million in public financing to build what it says will be a $1 billion factory that will employ 4,500 people.
That's a little less than the $1.3 billion Tesla got from the state to open its battery
factory, but it makes one wonder if state officials have seen more from the company than we did at CES.
We do know a bit about the company's primary funder, Yueting, who is known for making the "Netflix of China." Nick Sampson, vice president of research and development and engineering, says the partnership will help connect people and their cars to the rest of their lives and make driving a more seamless part of living.
We also know FF has hired a very serious team. The team making the presentation on Monday night—Richard Kim, the company's global design director, Ding Lei, a co-founder, and Sampson—all have serious auto backgrounds, and they are just part of the 750 people FF says it now employs.
FF boasts several former Tesla employees as well as employees poached from other major car and technology companies. Despite the tag line circulating in the press, Sampson says the company is not a Tesla killer, and it's really gas-powered car makers that need to look out, not the Elon Musk-run Silicon Valley car builder.
And now the unknowns. Sampson said the company was going to operate like a software company, at software company speed, but the only thing revealed by the company so far, the FFZero1, doesn't seem like a step toward production. It's a cool, wild, impractical car that will never see a driveway. Still, Sampson says production is "a couple of years" away.
There's the matter of the mysterious CEO. And the Apple rumor that won't die. It's hard to imagine a company as flush as Apple needing help from the Netflix of China to build a car, but stranger things have happened. Newsweek asked Sampson directly if FF was a front for Apple, and all he would say is "we can't confirm anything at this point."
FF's press materials talked about a new type of ownership, but if that's the plan it was nowhere to be seen at CES. It's hard to imagine sharing the FFZero1, and Sampson said the company's early plans will involve a luxury product, also something that doesn't sound conducive to sharing.
There are reports that there is another car out there, something that didn't fall out of a Batman movie, but FF decided not to show that to us yet. Maybe it's not ready. But it doesn't look like the FFZero1 will be burning up pavement soon, either.
Whatever the case, FF at CES managed to make a lot of people more interested in this company that is not, not a Tesla killer.
Uncommon Knowledge
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