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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.
Right, because nothing says "we're taking this shit seriously" like naming your company Google.
Yeah! Cars will never catch on. Get a horse, dummy!
"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.
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.
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.
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.
But it's an electric car company, and electricity is really cheap there, because of hydro power from the raging Colorado river! Oh, wait...