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Faraday Future Selects Las Vegas As Home For $1B Electric Car Factory (autoblog.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Faraday Future, the newest and most unknown player in the electric car game, has selected North Las Vegas as the home for their billion dollar factory. The 3 million square foot factory will be built on 900 acres and create 4,500 jobs. Faraday Future will release more information on their Tesla fighter, a 100% electric car, at CES in January. Autoblog reports: "Nevada topped finalists California, Georgia and Louisiana in the race to land the 2.5 million square foot plant. It's expected to sit on 600 acres in North Las Vegas's Apex Industrial Park and bring 4,500 jobs to Nevada. Mayor John Lee called the site choice 'a transformational opportunity' for his city of about 220,000 residents. North Las Vegas boomed as the nation's fastest-growing city in the early 2000s and nearly busted when the recession hit and pushed it close to insolvency."
900 acres will sit on 600 acres? Me thinks this company has invented more than just a new electric car design.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
They deserve to fail horribly just for having such a stupid name.
I'd have gone for Henry Horseless, or maybe Volt Vagons.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Because there is so much water to go around out there in the foreseeable future..
Yes build a factory, in a desert where there is no water. What are they thinking?
So much money invested in electric cars, yet not that many people want one.
The workers can work 24x7 due to all the meth that's floating in the air. Or is that Reno? I forget, it's been so long.
"We plan to revolutionize the automobile industry by creating an integrated, intelligent mobility system that protects the earth and improves the living environment of mankind," wrote Jia Yueting (ZHAW' YOO'-weh-ting), who's the founder and CEO of the holding company LeTV.
California-based automaker Faraday Future's choice of Nevada over three other states is contingent on state lawmakers' approval of tax incentives that haven't been publicly described.
Already Tesla is striking its own trail, its superchargers not inter operating with nascent common charging interfaces of other companies. At least Tesla has declared it will not sue others copying its designs, so Tesla chargers might end up as the de-facto standards. Hope this new venture interoperates with the existing infrastructure and not be another walled garden.
I think the tipping point would be something like charging stations as ubiquitous as gas stations and one gets a 120 mile range in 20 minutes. Not as good as gas car for long distance, but good enough to tolerate it for the occasional long drives a few times a year.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Faraday Future will release more information on their Tesla fighter, 100% electric car at CES in January.
Why would you build a $1Billion factory or even plan one before you have a marketable product in an industry that is promising but barely exists? Who would finance that? I don't care how wealthy the backers (allegedly some mysterious Chinese guy named Jia Yueting) are, that make zero sense unless the backer has no expectation of a return on their investment. Something bigger and possibly fishy is going on here. I'd like to know who really is financing this because that would explain a lot about what their motivations might be.
Furthermore building manufacturing plants in the middle of the desert is nuts. Sure you can get some solar power but it just stretches already thin water resources even further. It's insanely bad public policy. The air conditioning bill alone will be astronomical.
Call me a party pooper or an underachiever, but I just dont think theres a market for a one billion dollar electric car.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Reasons for chosing Las Vegas:
1. Because Detroit turned them down.
2. Because they've got "a lucky feeling about this one"
3. They're spending a billion dollars on a new car factory before they've even got a prototype... they probably felt they would be legally required to build it somewhere that permits gambling.
4. Because if it all goes horribly wrong, they could just convert the whole place into a casino.
Faraday Future, the newest and most unknown player in the electric car game
It's unknown if there are more unknown unknowns, we don't know if those in the know know more about this unknown rather than other unknowns. Needless to say we will all know about the known unknowns as soon as there is more to know.
this is a huge bet on a unknown product in an unknown market with unknown profits. it is what entrepreneurship is all about, but i hope only the risk takers will take the loses if it fails; investors and a town that has not learned its lesson.
unfortunately whole electric car business(in spite of its popularity hereabouts in slashdot) is subsidy driven (meaning losses are on tax payers).
I hear there's a tech company with $200B in cash that's rumored to be building a car.
No it almost certainly is not Apple. Apple would have little reason to hide the fact that they were getting into building cars. Furthermore, Apple as a corporation has some.. ahem, control issues. I very much doubt that they would work through proxies like this - it's completely out of character for them. Furthermore there have been plenty of journalists asking if Apple is involved and the answer seems to be a pretty clear no.
They also said they would never make a tablet computer, too.
Oh, well that's a clearly compelling piece of evidence... Glad you cleared that up with such an airtight argument. [/sarcasm]
Seriously, could it be Apple? I suppose, but it doesn't really make a lot of sense. The argument for it is basically that A) Apple has a lot of money and B) there are rumors they are thinking of building cars and C) Apple is secretive. That's it. That's a pretty thin argument. There is, to my knowledge, no known link between the two companies. Zero. So saying it has to be Apple is the sort of leap a conspiracy theorist would come up with. If you've got something more than that, please share with the class. I won't be embarrassed to be wrong but I require a bit more evidence than vague conjectures.
Based on the what we know of this company and their product so far I would be willing to invest up to $0 in it. However, if I know my government, I have already invested thousands in it.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
The name of the company almost sounds like something that would come out from the Fallout universe.
It just doesn't add up. Water is scarce and expensive. Cooling is expensive. It just doesn't make sense.
But it's aliens. They're building this new facility over a giant under ground vault system filled with amazing alien technology.
Tax rates are a major reason companies are moving to Nevada and Texas from California and elsewhere.
The corporate income tax rate is 0%. Payroll taxes are 1.45% of the amount over $50,000, so lower-paid positions cost nothing in state payroll taxes.
Compare California, with a 8.85% corporate tax rate vs 0% in AZ. California payroll tax is something like 7.5% of the -first- $7000, plus 1.5% of everything else.
I actually also really discount the Apple Car idea, myself.
Sounds like we have the same thought. I have NO idea why Apple would want to get into the business of manufacturing automobiles. I work in that industry. The companies with the best margins (Toyota, Porsche, etc) clear around 10% net profit. Compare that with the 25%-30% Apple currently enjoys and it's hard to see how Apple could get into the market without incurring massive shareholder dissatisfaction. (read lawsuits galore) There is a reason there hasn't been a new major car company in decades.
Like you point out, cars are massively more complicated than the products Apple currently makes, have huge capital requirements, difficult legal issues, entrenched competitors, etc. Apple is a remarkable company but even they would have a hard time with this. Obviously they have the war chest to give it a go but I'm not sure people appreciate just how massively different building cars is from designing consumer electronics.
Putting a new car factory in the desert smacks of stupidity to me.
Are they doing themselves a disservice by naming their company after Faraday? Doesn't it seem like they're trying to clone the success of Tesla with that? Not trying to be off-topic, but I just can't understand the business strategy.
BSD is for people who love Unix, Linux is for people who hate Microsoft.
You can drive from Vegas to LA or SD in a Tesla.. You can't do the 4-5 hour non-stop run you can do in a ICE car.
You'll need to stop at one supercharger, Barstow is mid way on the 300 mile trip. 150 mile charge at a Supercharger is about 20 minutes. With a Tesla S90, you might be able to do LA to Vegas on a single charge, depending on where in LA and where in Vegas your endpoints are.
"and create 4,500 jobs."
yeah for about 2 years before it folds
Not really sure where you got $200B in cash.
5 Seconds on google would have answered your question. The only place you really need to look is their financial statements. Yes they really have that much. Much of it is parked overseas or in various investments.
For the record, Apple has more cash on hand than Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook COMBINED.
There are very few companies in the world that do well with multiple products lines in the same space, and even fewer that do well with multiple product lines in radically different spaces. Apple has become wildly successful going after things they do well in the areas they know, generating repeat business and creating a lot of satisfied customers.
The biggest reason why I'm pretty sure it isn't Apple behind this weird venture in the desert is simple. Apple has ~$200 billion in cash. They could buy 100% of Ford, GM, FiatChrysler AND Honda and at their current market capitalization and still have several billion left over. They have ZERO reason to shadow finance some speculative startup in an industry they have no experience with. Would make far more sense to buy a company like GM outright and run it as an independent subsidiary.
Note I'm not saying they should buy those companies (they really shouldn't) but merely that they could.
Not a good idea. That's where that manhole cover is due to come back down.
Have gnu, will travel.
Nevada doesn't have an *water* problem, they contribute more water to the Colorado river than they take out of it.
The mere existence of Las Vegas at it's current size IS a water problem. There is zero reason for a city that size to exist in the middle of the desert. The amount of water that has to be diverted to support Las Vegas is obscene.
Their problem is that California, which is totally overpopulated and drought stricken, desperately needs Nevada's water
The fact that California's farmers use more water does not excuse the existence of Las Vegas and it certainly isn't a justification for making the place larger than it already is. It is a ridiculous place to build a factory, no matter what tax incentives they offer.
Also, Las Vegas is powered by the Hoover dam.
No it is not. 95% of the power generated by the dam goes to other states.
The worst place you could put this factory is in one of the cold climate states, where the power would almost certainly come from coal.
Cold climate states have dams too and some generate far more power than the Hoover dam. Factories are generally cheaper to heat than to cool. I should know because I've run several of them in both hot and cold climates. Unless they build their own power plant (solar?) this plant will be powered by fossil fuels just like the rest of Vegas.
"Tesla", "Faraday"... Watt is going on with these company names? Next thing you know, they'll giving cars names like "Volt"!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Americans pay bugger-all in taxes. But if they could turn all the whining & bellyaching they do about it into heat & electricity, they could power the planet.
Tesla v2.0
Current Apple competitors do not have the same profit margins as Apple either.
Incorrect. Both Google and Microsoft both have net profit margins comparable to Apple. Go look at their financials. They are all between 20-30% net margins depending on the time period examined and those sorts of margins are nothing unusual for software companies. (Yes Apple is really a software company) Those sorts of margins are unheard of for manufacturing companies. Apple will not change this equation.
Today's cars are becoming computer driven, it is Apple field again.
Not all software is the same. The difference between the software in a car and the software in a PC is huge. Apple's facility with consumer electronics should not be assumed to translate well to automobiles. While there is plenty of electronics in a modern car, there is far more to a car that has nothing to do with electronics. Designing and tuning a suspension or building a structural frame or a seat are not software and never will be.
You just don't know how successful they will be or not and what they will show. Probably iCar v1 will not be huge success, but once the hype will be driven up, iCar v2 or v3 should attract masses of iFans willing to pay 20% or 30% more for extra bells an whistles that "only Apple has".
Here's what you don't understand. We're talking about the largest purchase people make outside of their house. The economics are completely different both on cost and . Apple quite simply cannot price these products that high and still sell enough of them to recover their costs. They cannot outsource the production like they currently do because it costs too much and there are too many quality problems. They CANNOT make 25%+ margins on cars because of the cost structure. Apple's brand will not change that equation. Apple has been successful because they've been focused on what they are good at which is software and industrial design for consumer electronics. If they want to swim off into the deep waters that is the auto industry, I wish them well, but you are deluded if you think they can maintain their margins in that industry.