Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.