Inside Faraday Future's Financial House of Cards (theverge.com)

Posted by msmash on Tuesday December 12, 2017 @04:00AM from the burn-out dept.

Sean O'Kane, reporting for The Verge: When Faraday Future emerged from stealth mode in 2015, it promised to transform the car industry with an American-made luxury electric vehicle that would someday be fully autonomous, maybe even sold through a subscription service. As we learned at CES 2017, the company was taking aim at Tesla with a car -- the FF91 -- that was designed to dazzle, with a 0-60 time of 2.4 seconds as jaw-dropping as the proposed $180,000 price tag. Since then, though, Faraday Future has been more focused on survival than speed. The Verge has learned from multiple sources about the nature of the company's financial plight. While Faraday Future posed as the newest California electric car startup that attracted top auto industry talent, 10 former employees and one person close to the company say the behavior and business practices of its chief investor have brought business to a halt. Also read: Everything wrong with Faraday Future's "Tesla killer"

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Sounds like a dreamer, not a businessman by King_TJ · 2017-12-12 04:09 · Score: 3, Interesting

He pushed for a much bigger factory in Nevada, like Tesla — a company that Faraday Future’s executives viewed as a competitor, and one that it had poached talent from — and increased the production target to multiple models and 150,000 units per year. The finance team spent weeks recalculating for this change in scope, these people say, and eventually determined the necessary investment cost would be about $3 billion.
"Once he saw that plan, he was like, ‘Well if four models and 150,000 is good, then we ought to be able to go to 5 million cars. What’s it going to take to go to 5 million cars?’” recalls one of these former employees. “That’s the kind of guy that he was, it was like, ‘Okay, but lets even think bigger. I need to be at 5 million cars by the end of 2025. In 10 years.’”
The statement, above, speaks volumes about the problems this company is having. The owner has NO clue how to build a business from the ground up, and apparently thinks funding will just "happen" because his ideas are cool.