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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."
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
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!
The first gasoline cars were reserved for rich people too. Their range was limited and there was poor infrastructure to support them. Over time that changed. Apple is very good at commoditizing quality products; don't count them out until we've seen what they built. Oil will run out or become prohibitively expensive to extract. I, for one, am glad that someone is working on the problem.
All of them are in the pockets of big oil, democrats just lie and pretend that they're not. Are you naive enough to think that the largest companies on earth don't hedge their bets? Trust me, they donate to both parties.
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.
If I understand your statement, you're saying that the money is coming back as Chinese investment in American hard assets, yes?
The end result of which will be, eventually, China (and Chinese citizens) owning a sizeable portion of American hard assets. We'll still work, but all the companies and corporate assets will be owned by China.
(I'm not coming down on China specifically - there are others, and I'm just using China as an example.)
So what you're saying is that because we've let our trade deficit run unchecked for many decades, eventually all our property will be owned by the foreign interests.
Is this an accurate summary?
(I note that the standard economic catechism was that free trade agreements would benefit the American consumer, which they would if the base assumptions were true. I'm trying to identify the false assumptions made by standard economic theory, of which there are many.)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Sounds like a cage fight to me...
There's already an established company called Faraday selling electric vehicles:
https://www.faradaybikes.com/