Faraday Future is the real-life equivalent of a franchised movie monster. While not a physical manifestation of evil, destined to rip apart promiscuous teens in increasingly elaborate ways, it does possess the unique ability to keep coming back every time you thought it had finally been destroyed.

Despite having lost a factory in Nevada, a chief financial officer, chief technology officer, lead designer, head of manufacturing, Formula E team, and the public’s trust (you can add bankruptcy rumors to the mix, too), LeEco chairman Jia Yueting now claims the company has suddenly managed to raise $1 billion in funding.

Jason Voorhees, eat your heart out. (Read More…)

Faraday Future has issued a strange response to the criticism surrounding its most recent high-profile “staffing adjustment.” Last week, news broke that the startup automaker’s chief financial officer, Stefan Krause, left the firm in October — forcing media outlets to play catch up. When the information made its way to The Truth About Cars, we dug back into Faraday’s current condition and reported that things were still a mess at its California headquarters.

Unwilling to let the automotive media monopolize the conversation, Faraday released a response letter. In it, the company accuses Krause of being fired for “dereliction of duty” and said it would be taking legal action against him. It’s the first time the startup had updated its media page in months and is a peculiar reaction to a staffing change that, at the time, seemed like the least of Faraday’s worries. (Read More…)

It’s been a while since we’ve discussed the ongoing plight of Faraday Future. While most of this year — and all of the last — was riddled with missteps from the automotive startup, we’ve taken a break from reporting on it. That wasn’t because its situation had improved, however. Oh boy, is that ever not the case.

Earlier this month, details emerged that the business was preparing to file for bankruptcy, followed immediately by the firm denying the validity of those claims. Then, news broke that Faraday’s chief financial officer, Stefan Krause, had quietly resigned in October — despite having been hired specifically to solve the company’s financial troubles back in March.

This got us wondering as to exactly how much more can go wrong before Faraday Future finally throws in the towel. (Read More…)

The honeymoon is over before it even began. The State of Nevada is ending its relationship with automaker Faraday Future, which once promised to build a vast and glorious manufacturing facility within its borders — in exchange for tax incentives.

Eschewing construction of its $1 billion promise in North Las Vegas due to financial woes, Faraday was insistent that it was going to begin construction on a smaller assembly plant before tackling the rest of the build site. According to the company, a bijou factory was to be the first phase of a multi-stage approach intended to bring the FF 91 swiftly to market.

In July, Faraday Future announced it would be placing that project on hold as well, but remained committed to using the Nevada site for long-term vehicle manufacturing. Until then, it said it would shift its 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.” If anyone knows what that gibberish means, we’d love to know. It’s been several months and we still can’t decipher that sentence into useful information.  (Read More…)

Faraday Future, the American electric vehicle startup backed by LeEco founder Jia Yueting, has abandoned plans to construct its now infamous $1 billion factory in Nevada due to severe financial woes. It’s another nail in Faraday’s coffin as the firm was claiming it would resume construction of the plant less than six months ago.

Work at the North Las Vegas site stalled in 2016 after repeated nonpayment to the construction firm and numerous suppliers.

It’s become a bit of a running gag, as Jia has begun pleading with literally anyone who will listen to give his automotive endeavors more time to pay up. Last week on Weibo, China’s biggest social-media site, Jia publicly promised to repay his debts as he committed himself his electric car businesses. He then resigned as chairman.

“Please give LeEco some time, please give LeEco car some time,” Jia wrote, admitting he had made financial errors in the past. “We will pay back creditors, suppliers and any other debts.”  (Read More…)

This week, China’s LeEco canned the majority of its North American workforce and we assumed the layoffs spelled trouble for its business interests at Faraday Future. Not so, claims the automotive startup. In an emailed response to our earlier article, Faraday says LeEco’s decision to massively scale back its U.S. operations will not affect its daily goings-on or hinder the development of the FF91 electric vehicle.

Faraday Future spokesman Rich Otto also wanted to ensure us the company has no layoffs of its own planned. Obviously, the grim situation over at LeEco had everyone wondering if that was it for FF. But the aspiring electric automaker has come back with a resounding not as far as we’re concerned. (Read More…)

China’s Netflix equivalent, LeEco, confirmed it would be eliminating the better part of its North American workforce today. LeEco has recently gotten involved in a myriad of expensive tech-focused endeavors that have wound up screwing its finances six ways from Sunday. One of those projects was serving as the primary financial backer of America’s Faraday Future, the electric car company we’ve been scrunching our faces at for over a year now.

Faraday seems to have encountered or created every problem an automotive startup could imagine and, with its primary source of income shrinking its U.S. employee base by 70 percent, things have never looked worse.  (Read More…)

We’re not going to recap all of Faraday Future’s staffing issues, financial hurdles, or uncouth business practices. If you’ve visited this website within the last year, you already know the company has some serious problems to overcome.

Despite these hardships, Faraday remains convinced it’ll resume construction at its stalled factory site in Nevada and someday bring the FF91 to market. However, we haven’t seen much of the EV since the debut of the beta version at CES in January — and it was beginning to look like we never would.

Then, without much fanfare, a video of the electric crossover surfaced on the company’s YouTube page on Monday. The new video shows a decidedly less beta-looking vehicle than Faraday has previewed in the past. That doesn’t mean this is a production car, but it does seem to show what one might look like if FF can weather the storm.  (Read More…)

Faraday Future, which spent 2016 as the automotive poster child for bad news, continues to face a myriad of problems. In this most recent hardship, we learn Faraday couldn’t even manage to choose a company name without stirring a legal backlash.

Faraday Bicycles, which manufactures electric-assisted pedal bikes, has filed a trademark lawsuit against Faraday Future in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. In the complaint, filed Tuesday, the e-bike company states Faraday Future has been infringing on its name — which it officially trademarked in October 2013. The legal action follows a November claim against FF over the acquisition of its domain name and nearly endless financial woes.  (Read More…)

Faraday Future is more of an automotive marketing company than it is an automaker. The company has been making unsubstantiated promises and ignoring its fiscal woes without giving much assurance that it will ever bring a production car — or assembly plant — into the real world. Problems have continued to mount and, like any deeply rooted zit, the situation is gradually coming to a head.

This month, Nevada State Treasurer Dan Schwartz demanded that the Governor’s Office of Economic Development conduct an audit of Faraday — throwing in Tesla for good measure. Schwartz has been critical of FF ever since it received government money to help build its factory, only to see work on the facility stalled due to nonpayment last fall. Faraday has since scaled back its construction plans, claiming that it was necessary to ensure production begins on schedule.

Now, FF’s primary backer, LeEco, is selling a 49-acre Silicon Valley property less than a year after purchasing it from Yahoo Inc. This comes after the company’s founder and CEO, Jia Yueting, explained to employees in November that LeEco was facing devastating financial issues stemming from its uncontrolled expansion. (Read More…)

Faraday Future’s preeminence in bad publicity has been unsurpassed as of late. It has amassed legal disputes almost as fast as I can report them, so another lawsuit might seem par for the course — until you realize it’s for an almost trifling amount over a mismanaged squabble surrounding the company’s domain name.

A complaint was filed against the automotive startup in San Francisco County Superior Court on November 18th of last year by a business acting as a broker for obtaining the company’s current domain name. The document outlines a $210,000 claim against Faraday for neglecting to remunerate Domains Cable for services that resulted in the acquisition of FF.com.  (Read More…)

Faraday Future had already broken ground on a sprawling $1 billion factory in North Las Vegas when a multi-million dollar late fee forced contractors to go on hiatus last November. Then, at CES 2017, the company announced the resumption of construction as the city’s mayor waved to the crowd — a physical manifestation of goodwill towards the company’s new promises.

What they did not say, however, was that the factory would be a fraction of the size as originally claimed, existing as a smaller-scale starter plant. Faraday is the automotive equivalent of Monty Python’s Black Knight. It continues to suffer horrendous blows that cripple its operational ability, all the while telling the world, “Tis but a scratch.” (Read More…)

When Faraday Future showcased its new car at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, everyone temporarily forgot the company was a structural and monetary dumpster fire. A large portion of that amnesia was the result of the extremely impressive presentation put on for the FF 91’s unveiling. Some of the visual effects used by Faraday in its presentations and propaganda marketing have been so impressive, it left me wondering who the company has trusted with those projects.

One company Faraday outsourced to was The Mill — a New York-based video production company that is suing Faraday for 1.8 million dollars over failure to pay it for a graphic presentation commissioned in September.

This is an exciting return to form for Faraday Future, which announced at CES that the construction of its Nevada factory — stalled due to similar payment issues — should continue shortly. (Read More…)

After much anticipation, Faraday Future finally revealed its production car, the FF 91. The presentation introduced the FF 91 as “the smartest car you’ll ever drive” and described capabilities of advanced sensors, machine learning, and autonomous driving — all great buzzwords. We saw a live demonstration of the FF 91’s ability to drive itself with the “driverless valet” feature. The car successfully parked itself in a parking lot outside the reveal and we were told to “never worry about parking again.”

Except, I watched the rest of the reveal and I’m pretty worried.

(Read More…)

One year after Faraday Future (FF) revealed its futuristic and racy FFZERO1 concept, the company has pulled back the curtain on its first production car.

The FF 91 is cut from cloth similar to the recently revealed Lucid Air. Both cars are being built by California-based, Chinese-backed companies. And both are scheduled to follow Tesla into the EV Super Sedan market as Trump’s first term hits its midpoint. (Read More…)