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Electric-Car Startup Faraday Future Building a $1 Billion Factory In California (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Faraday Future, an electric car startup based in California, wants to take on Tesla. They're building a $1 billion factory in California. Business Insider reports: "The startup of about 400 employees has poached executive talent from Tesla and also draws its name from a luminary scientist — Michael Faraday — who helped harness for humanity the forces of nature. Even Faraday's public announcement that California, Georgia, Louisiana and Nevada are finalists for the factory mirrors the approach Tesla took to build a massive battery factory. Nevada won that bidding war among several states last year by offering up to $1.3 billion in tax breaks and other incentives. Faraday hopes to distinguish itself by branding the car less as transportation than a tool for the connected class."
Is it April Fools' Day?
article: Four states are contenders and the company says to expect an announcement within weeks.
There are some that posit that Faraday is a thinly disguised front for Apple....
Funders: Undisclosed.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's the fraction of a popular mobile app.
Faraday hopes to distinguish itself by branding the car less as transportation than a tool for the connected class.
So, luxury-class like Tesla, only with more pretentiousness?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
They aren't proposing to build in just A California, but THE California!
1.) What is the "connected class"? It sounds very elitist, like 1per centers.
2.) Electric vehicles will always be limited by their battery capacity. Nikola Tesla had shown, back in the Thirties, that resonance coupling can eliminate batteries all together.
3.) Competing against the fossil fuel industry will go nowhere since the politicians are in the pockets of Big Oil.
3.) Pilfering talent from Tesla is not going to be without friction. Competition is good for innovation, but co-operation is still better for industry.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Faraday hopes to distinguish itself by branding the car less as transportation than a tool for the connected class.
Who the fuck cares about the marketing bullshit they put in their ads?
Branding the car "less as transportation"? What the fuck? People view cars first and foremost as transportation.
This is marketing idiocy in its purest form.
Ross Perot's "Great Sucking Sound" in reverse is starting to show up everywhere as the trillions we printed and sent out the trade deficit to China and elsewhere over the last 20 years is now boomeranging back into any possible hard asset class that isn't nailed down. Same goes for bay area real estate. Hopefully the money won't be excessively dumb.
I'll enjoy watching you suffer the choking grip of California taxes & regulations while Tesla rides high right across the border. How could they be so idiotic? http://www.rgj.com/story/news/...
Should I be worried since my tax dollars have been subsidizing Tesla's loss of almost 300 million dollars last year?
They sell it as an "experience" (a totally empty meaningless word) because they can't sell it on measurable quantaties (specs, price, value).
Marketing wins and the consumer loses.
They sell it as an experience because this phrasing appeals to the buyers' emotions.
See Simon Sinek's "Start With Why" TED talk for a good overview of how and why this works.
A copier salesman can't just say "this unit will make x copies per second", he has to say "this unit will save you money". Martin Luthor King didn't say "I have a plan", he said "I have a dream". And so on.
It's circumstantial evidence of Apple - they sell products at an emotional level.
If I want a car other than for transport, I'll go to the scrapyard and stick a fucking iPhone suction mount to the windshield.
Retro chic, zero emissions, 100% recycled, connects to iTunes, and inadequate for its primary purpose. Hipster seal of approval.
Gas cars seem like they really are doomed to going the way of the horse and buggy. Ultimately we're going to have to have a bunch of different electric car manufacturers otherwise Tesla would be a monopoly, and despite the geek's adoration for Elon Musk's dick, a monopoly is generally a bad thing, even if it's headed by a saint (which Musk is not).
The big car manufacturers are already hilariously slow moving and behind the curve, and are basically following Tesla's technology and lead. It seems pretty obvious to me that they aren't going to exist in the future except in severely shrunken form. So we urgently need new electric car manufacturers before it's Tesla that's the big clunky traditionalist car manufacturer.
In other words, this is a good thing and everyone should be happy about it. Except maybe Musk.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Smells like Fail.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
This is either a complete hoax potentially set up to get >$1 Billion in 'tax incentives' from some state willing to bid on an imaginary product OR it's just a marketing stunt to start getting press for some far in the future car.
There is 0 way that anyone, I don't care how well funded it is, goes from MAYBE a 'design on paper' to manufacturing a car in 2 years, especially one that's claimed to be better than the Tesla. The amount of testing needed would be seriously daunting, if nobody has seen or heard of a mysterious electric car being tested to be manufactured in 2 years than it doesn't exist.
Doesn't even matter if this is just a front for the 'Apple Car'...where's the actual design for that car? Prototypes? Anything that suggests that a well funded 'start up' would have any hope of manufacturing such beast, not to mention set up a means to sell them, service them etc., etc. etc.
Executives do the most generic job in the fucking galaxy. You can take any executive and drop it into any company's executive position and he/she wll perform identically badly.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I'm waiting for Einstein Electric, who'll have the slogan "Spooky autos at a distance." Unfortunately I expect them to be entangled with regulators for a relatively long period of time.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Faraday is linked to a chinese multibillionaire http://lasvegassun.com/news/2015/sep/14/legal-documents-link-faraday-future-chinese-/. One doesn't become a billionaire in China without being close or partially owned by the Chinese government and or Chinese military. Case in point are the 3 Chinese hospitality companies thinking about bidding for Starwood (Westin etc.). They are all owned in part by the Chinese government. My guess is that Faraday is no different.
I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but... you know all those little Apple decals people put on their cars? That's so we can identify each-other at a distance, so we can light off quietly leaving all you unenlightened sots and go off into the woods and have wild, naked, Apple-love-fueled fantastic sex-orgies, that you "Windows" and "Android" losers will never be able to attend or understand. Even if you try to sneak into the pantheon that is Apple, you will never see these wonders until you accept Apple into your heart as your technological savior, and bow down before Steve Jobs, all praise his Holy Jobsness, Blessings and Peace be upon Him, and his Apostle, Tim Cook, Magnified is his Name, and are deemed worthy. The parties are amazing, the sex, unimaginably satisfying and mind-blowing, and the cake and wine we have after is fat-free.
You win.
You are the embodiment of evil itself, but never fear.. The Lord's Inflation shall keep you powerless by consuming your ill-gotten pile of dirty savings.
I can go to any petrol bowser at any service station and fill any make and model of petrol car with fuel. Will electric charging stations go the same way, or is electricity too cheap for that to make sense? It would suck if electric cars took off and you had to drive 50km past 2 Tesla charge stations and a Volkswagon charge station to reach the nearest Faraday charge station.
"So tell me, exactly which vehicles have unlimited range?"
Sailboat
Sounds like a cage fight to me...
There's already an established company called Faraday selling electric vehicles:
https://www.faradaybikes.com/
Frankly, I'm not excited about driving in a Faraday cage, my cell phone already has enough troubles getting a signal as is.
I never imagined that you could get so much douche into a bicycle.
Oh, just so you know, bikes are not cars. There's a slight difference.
Good Orators and speakers develop that skill by listening and doing. There is an element of "having an ear" for the cadence. But as you've noticed from toastmasters, a lot of it is just learning how to watch the audience and be 'engaging'.
There's a difference between looking out over the mass of people and looking at different parts of the crowd, and actually "looking" at a specific persons..
Tesla has built out a pretty big network (and is still growing) of rapid chargers as well. It goes a long way (in combination with 200+ mile battery range) to making a Tesla practical for long distance travel.
The Leaf, Volt, i3, and all the rest of the 50-100 mile cars are nice for neighborhood commuters (for which there is a significant demand), but the charging infrastructure needs work. The "30 something living in an apartment and commuting 10 miles to work" has trouble charging at home (apartment managers don't install the outlets, if there's even on-site parking) and at work (infrastructure costs..).
I work at a tech oriented company with about 5000 employees which has roughly 3 times the average adoption of EVs (that is, there's probably 100 people with EVs), and there are about 20 level 1 charging spots available (think 15Amp 120V wall plug). Fine for a Leaf for that 20 mile commute, because if you don't get a spot, you can still make it back home. But there's a significant number of plaintive emails everyday to the ev mailing list "Please, can someone free up a spot so I can charge enough to get home". Whether this is because they have a 40 mile (one-way) commute and MUST charge at work, or because they forgot to charge at home, or whatever, it is still indicative of a problem.
"...less as transportation than a tool for the connected class."
The idea of which immediately makes it far less interesting than Tesla. Besides... what's the "connected class"? The majority of the population now, wouldn't that be?
If not Apple, this does smell like a similar mindset. The one thing that Apple has done right in the past is pretty much what Tesla (and Fisker, less successfully) already did with autos—maintain some purity of design in the face of compromising forces. So there's not a new niche here to exploit.
Tesla sales numbers are tiny compared to real automakers; they missed their sales targets last quarter by like 30% and have to sell this 4th quarter 17,000 vehicles to make up and hit their annual sales targets, and Tesla's never sold more than 14,000 vehicles per quarter. They burn millions per day and have yet to turn a profit. Why would you want to take them on? Take on a real car company, like Ford or Toyota; take on someone who's profitable, sustainable and successful.
Why the hell are the building a factory? They claim 4 states so you don't know which ones, if it isn't Michigan or Pennsylvania (read Pittsburgh) where thousands of blue collar workers are currently looking for a job and are trained heavy manufacturing guys who are also out of work and therefore a low cost of labor (as opposed to Silicon Valley where Tesla's factory is), then write these guys off as another EV also-ran.
Seriously, when are we going to get an electric car company with a sound business model? Why not develop a great technology and license it to the real auto manufacturers like Honda and Toyota and GM and Ford? All of them want to get into the EV business but their tech isn't as good, but they already have the factories, the workers, the assembly know-how, and the economy of scale to make a truly game-changing EV: one that is priced like a Honda Civic and not a luxury sedan.
Sounds to me like the brainstorming session for company names went like this:
Alice: "Okay, so we need a company name that sounds like it's got something to do with electrics."
Wally: "How about using the name of a famous electrical scientist?"
Alice: "Great idea. Any suggestions?"
Dilbert: "Watt?"
Alice: "I said, 'Great idea. Any suggestions?'"
Dilbert: "Whatever. How about Ampere"
Boss: "Nope. GM got that one."
Dilbert: "Okay, Voltaire?"
Wally: "Nope, Chevy."
Dilbert: "Fair enough. How about Ohm?"
Boss: "Are you crazy? Nobody will be able to spell it or say it. That's almost as bad a name as the Ford Ka."
Dilbert: "Uh, Tesla?"
Boss: "You're not even trying, are you? Right. Executive decision, we'll call it Faraday."
+1 for Private Internet Access
That doesn't ring true at all.
No CEO is going to be able to name an electrical scientist other than Edison.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
But where would they get batteries from to compete? Tesla?
"branding the car less as transportation than a tool for the connected class"
Is it only me, but did the marketing boffins make a bad choice of words for an electric car whose main concerns seem to be around the range...
So by "Connected Class" do they mean the people that have to have their car constantly plugged in? LOL! :p
Or is it that you have to be part of the mafia or something?
Plenty of companies that are doing EVs.
Instead, these new companies should focus on moving commercial vehicles to EVs, or even nat gas series hybrid.
Right now, few commercial vehicles get more than 10 MPG. So, if a company comes along that creates a nat gas series hybrid cheaper to OWN and run than current vehicles, they will OWN the market.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.