Electric car company Faraday Future just shitcanned its ambitious plans to build a gigantic factory in the US state of Nevada just 5 months after restarting construction.
The company had stopped production 11 months prior to that due to ongoing issues with money, the most important ingredient for making business soup.
For those who don’t know, Faraday Future burst onto the electric car scene back in January 2016 with an impressive vehicle that was much faster than Tesla‘s similar model.
They’ve got some gnarly plans and taking Tesla’s position at the top of the industry is definitely one of them. The other? They wanted to build a very, very large factory to start pumping out some cars.
The Apex site in North Las Vegas was set to cost $1 billion and cover a spacious 1 million square feet, the only problem is their Chinese financier is having major cash troubles. Oh dear.
Jia Yueting, the founder of FF’s major investor, LeEco, just had $182 million in assets frozen by a Chinese court for not making loan payments. At the time, FF said these issues wouldn’t affect production of their first vehicle, the FF91, which is due for release in 2018, but things are looking dire.
“We have decided to put a hold on our factory at the Apex site in North Las Vegas. We remain committed to the Apex site in Las Vegas for long-term vehicle manufacturing,” said Stefan Krause, Faraday Future’s chief financial officer for the past four months.“We at Faraday Future are significantly shifting our business strategy to position the company as the leader in user-ship personal mobility — a vehicle usage model that reimagines the way users access mobility. As a result of this shift in direction, we are in the final stages of confirming a new manufacturing facility that presents a faster path to start-of-production and aligns with future strategic options.”
But a senior-level source told Business Insider that they’re probably far more fucked than anyone’s letting on, calling it a “precarious situation.” According to this mystery source, the company’s operations at their LA headquarters have also been scaled back.
One former executive even said FF is in danger of missing its payroll which, as you can imagine, would lead to employees quitting en masse.
It’s a shame because the company are actually capable of making an incredibly efficient and powerful electric car, evidenced by their recent record-breaking time in the recent Pikes Peak uphill race. But that may also the problem, says the ex-executive.
“They’ve burned through cash on unimportant things (Formula E racers, polished videos, fake race cars),” they said.“They did set a new record for the Pike’s Peak climb which I feel exemplifies the brilliance of those engineers they’ve brought on… it’s just a shame that it seems it may all go to waste.”
Source: The Verge.
Photo: Faraday Future.
