Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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.
What is the 'connected class', pretty damn obvious, nothing but an empty marketing spiel, pretty much the norm for modern marketing. The really interesting thing is the rapidly growing battle ground for the electric car market place.
What is hidden in all this, is why current infernal combustion manufacturers are so slow to change. The problem for them is the massive capital investment in infernal combustion production lines and facilities and cars designed around the infernal combustion engine. Swapping to electrics means wiping that production line capital value straight off the books whilst still saddled (snicker) with the debt and then having to borrow more for electric car production.
Psychopathic executives will be looking for means by which to make the switch to electric whilst dumping the losses on someone else, preferable the gullible masses pension funds (there is a lot of write offs to occur hence the big grab for US social security funds, so those funds can be used to buy a whole bunch investments destined to fail).
So existing infernal combustion manufacturers, start off new electric car companies, with ownership buried under layers because of the negative impact on the perceived capital value of the infernal combustion assets. Then they shift debts to the infernal combustion assets and capital assets to the electric car company, this done via debt mechanisms and then they sell the destined to implode infernal combustion assets. Bankruptcy sets in and they then buy back any remaining assets including branding at a huge discount, leaving a trail of debt and golden parachutes behind.
Currently it makes much more financial sense to start off a new electric car company than it does for an existing infernal combustion engine manufacturer to write off those assets and basically borrow all that money to turn themselves into an electric car manufacturer.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Steve Jobs begs to disagree. Companies are made and destroyed by the top management. Look no further than HP.
Not sure how this will affect Tesla, but it is likely that the poached executives will move on to poaching the engineers.