subtitle: STRIKE 1 aka the FFZERO1 Concept(ual) Car ...post#5
Inside Faraday Future, the secretive car company chasing Tesla
& video
the Verge
By Tamara Warren | November 19, 2015
Inside a suburban Los Angeles industrial building that once served as an R&D facility for Japanese automotive giant Nissan, natural midday light spills through the windows. Today, a very different company occupies this space...
This is the headquarters of Faraday Future, a young, seemingly well-funded company with an odd name that hasn’t said much about what it’s working on. We know that electric cars are involved, and we know that they’re probably years away from production. In the year and a half since Faraday’s founding, it has transformed this facility into a bustling corporate campus, stacked with a who’s-who list of poaches from some of California’s most prominent tech companies.
Tesla is one of those companies... ...But now trading as a public company, Tesla is no longer the feisty new kid on the block — and it could be ripe for disruption, if Faraday gets its way.
Faraday Future first came into the news last summer when news leaked of its existence and its intention to produce electric cars. But speculation swirled around the company’s origins, its finances, and exactly what kind of car it was intending to build. In recent weeks, intrigue has heightened, as news has trickled about its links to Chinese investors and the identity of its unnamed CEO.
This week, Faraday Future chief designer Richard Kim is expected to announce that the company will participate at CES in January, its first major trade show. Though Faraday is still very much in stealth mode, it recently announced that it plans to spend $1 billion on a US factory that will produce electric cars using a non-traditional sales model. ( which Las Vegas is drooing over )...
...While a prototype might be introduced soon, mass manufacturing could still be years away. Making cars isn’t easy; Google, for instance, farms out the production of its self-driving prototypes to a third party.
In Faraday’s engineering facility, the floors are a spotless white with sundry car parts and brightly colored machines tucked in corners. A large 3D printer sits on a table. Engineers are hunched over terminals. During my visit, conversation among the employees was the only audible sound. The work of developing modern electric cars is quiet, it turns out.
It’s probably no coincidence that the brief history of Faraday recalls Tesla’s early years. When Tesla was founded in 2003 by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, Elon Musk was an investor in the background. Later, when Musk took the reins as chairman and eventually CEO, he doggedly guided it to manufacture the Roadster, largely through sheer force of will. In doing so, Tesla turned to the auto industry to mine for talent and attracted employees from its production partner, Lotus. Now, Faraday has attracted a fair number of former Tesla staff to join as senior managers and throughout the ranks of the company.
One of those executives is Nick Sampson, a senior VP at Faraday in charge of R&D and engineering. He also acts as the company’s public face...
...Sampson says Faraday was born from a conversation. "Three people sitting around in an office, discussing the future of the car and what people’s mobility would be in the future. Eighteen months later, we’ve got over 400 people working from all over the world," he says. He expects that number to double within the next year...
...First off, Faraday sought expertise from beyond the auto business. "We reached out into the aerospace industries, the medical device industries, into the internet and technology industries to pull together a group of people with a diverse range of skills that could build a product that’s new and different," he says. In addition to Tesla, BMW, and Audi, the new hires come from Apple, SpaceX, and Hulu.
But I still wasn’t exactly sure what "the Faraday future" was, and this company — this secretive, well-funded institution with ambiguous goals — has done little to answer questions in the year and a half since its founding. In describing Faraday’s goals to me, Sampson’s first reference point was the desire to see more connectivity in cars...
...though, details are scant. Faraday’s cars will be electric, and Sampson suggested that they will be autonomous. More pointedly, he focused on the potential for new ownership models that Faraday is considering. "Uber, for instance, is a new way of traveling, a new way of getting about. Some people are considering not even having a car. The cars of the future have got to meet those needs," he says. Sampson imagines various custom vehicles that are designed for specific purposes such as a family trip, the work commute, or Home Depot runs. "I don’t have to buy one compromise vehicle, I can just have use of the perfect model when I need it, like a subscription service. We now subscribe to music; we used to buy music."
For now, Faraday might not be quite ready to reveal its strategy — but it can’t sit still...
...Later, I met up with Kim, Faraday’s design chief, who greeted me standing next to a covered prototype. As part of our arrangement, I agreed to keep my impressions on its exterior silhouette out of my report — but its shape was distinct from anything I’ve seen on the road. "It’s a car to some degree," Kim tells me, who was previously responsible for designing BMW’s electrified i3 and i8 models. "It’s a mobility device, and when people interact with cars, there is of course the irrational desire to have it. The car is still going to be beautiful, as traditional car designers want to have."
We moved on to the design studio on the top floor, where jazzy house music played in the background. Some 65 designers and support staff report to Kim, and on the day of my visit, the team buzzed with excitement about the work being done. In addition to traditional automotive CAD modeling, the designers work with Oculus Rift and augmented reality.
Kim said he and his team made up the process for designing with new technology on the fly in order to meet their tight design deadlines. "We’re doing things super fast in a third of the time that I am used to," says Kim. We’re still doing it high-quality and it’s giving new insight to see things immediately," he says. "We’re using the technology as it’s being developed. You see designers with a VR headset and they are pointing in space." Everyone I spoke to at the company said they feel a sense of freedom to do things that they couldn’t do at other companies, which clearly is helping to motivate them — even on that late Friday afternoon, the designers seemed focused. They’d better; for now, Faraday still doesn’t have a product, and the financial mathematics of the car business are brutal. Just ask Elon Musk.
Inside Faraday Future, the secretive car company chasing Tesla
& video
the Verge
By Tamara Warren | November 19, 2015
Inside a suburban Los Angeles industrial building that once served as an R&D facility for Japanese automotive giant Nissan, natural midday light spills through the windows. Today, a very different company occupies this space...
This is the headquarters of Faraday Future, a young, seemingly well-funded company with an odd name that hasn’t said much about what it’s working on. We know that electric cars are involved, and we know that they’re probably years away from production. In the year and a half since Faraday’s founding, it has transformed this facility into a bustling corporate campus, stacked with a who’s-who list of poaches from some of California’s most prominent tech companies.
Tesla is one of those companies... ...But now trading as a public company, Tesla is no longer the feisty new kid on the block — and it could be ripe for disruption, if Faraday gets its way.
Faraday Future first came into the news last summer when news leaked of its existence and its intention to produce electric cars. But speculation swirled around the company’s origins, its finances, and exactly what kind of car it was intending to build. In recent weeks, intrigue has heightened, as news has trickled about its links to Chinese investors and the identity of its unnamed CEO.
This week, Faraday Future chief designer Richard Kim is expected to announce that the company will participate at CES in January, its first major trade show. Though Faraday is still very much in stealth mode, it recently announced that it plans to spend $1 billion on a US factory that will produce electric cars using a non-traditional sales model. ( which Las Vegas is drooing over )...
...While a prototype might be introduced soon, mass manufacturing could still be years away. Making cars isn’t easy; Google, for instance, farms out the production of its self-driving prototypes to a third party.
In Faraday’s engineering facility, the floors are a spotless white with sundry car parts and brightly colored machines tucked in corners. A large 3D printer sits on a table. Engineers are hunched over terminals. During my visit, conversation among the employees was the only audible sound. The work of developing modern electric cars is quiet, it turns out.
It’s probably no coincidence that the brief history of Faraday recalls Tesla’s early years. When Tesla was founded in 2003 by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, Elon Musk was an investor in the background. Later, when Musk took the reins as chairman and eventually CEO, he doggedly guided it to manufacture the Roadster, largely through sheer force of will. In doing so, Tesla turned to the auto industry to mine for talent and attracted employees from its production partner, Lotus. Now, Faraday has attracted a fair number of former Tesla staff to join as senior managers and throughout the ranks of the company.
One of those executives is Nick Sampson, a senior VP at Faraday in charge of R&D and engineering. He also acts as the company’s public face...
...Sampson says Faraday was born from a conversation. "Three people sitting around in an office, discussing the future of the car and what people’s mobility would be in the future. Eighteen months later, we’ve got over 400 people working from all over the world," he says. He expects that number to double within the next year...
...First off, Faraday sought expertise from beyond the auto business. "We reached out into the aerospace industries, the medical device industries, into the internet and technology industries to pull together a group of people with a diverse range of skills that could build a product that’s new and different," he says. In addition to Tesla, BMW, and Audi, the new hires come from Apple, SpaceX, and Hulu.
But I still wasn’t exactly sure what "the Faraday future" was, and this company — this secretive, well-funded institution with ambiguous goals — has done little to answer questions in the year and a half since its founding. In describing Faraday’s goals to me, Sampson’s first reference point was the desire to see more connectivity in cars...
...though, details are scant. Faraday’s cars will be electric, and Sampson suggested that they will be autonomous. More pointedly, he focused on the potential for new ownership models that Faraday is considering. "Uber, for instance, is a new way of traveling, a new way of getting about. Some people are considering not even having a car. The cars of the future have got to meet those needs," he says. Sampson imagines various custom vehicles that are designed for specific purposes such as a family trip, the work commute, or Home Depot runs. "I don’t have to buy one compromise vehicle, I can just have use of the perfect model when I need it, like a subscription service. We now subscribe to music; we used to buy music."
For now, Faraday might not be quite ready to reveal its strategy — but it can’t sit still...
...Later, I met up with Kim, Faraday’s design chief, who greeted me standing next to a covered prototype. As part of our arrangement, I agreed to keep my impressions on its exterior silhouette out of my report — but its shape was distinct from anything I’ve seen on the road. "It’s a car to some degree," Kim tells me, who was previously responsible for designing BMW’s electrified i3 and i8 models. "It’s a mobility device, and when people interact with cars, there is of course the irrational desire to have it. The car is still going to be beautiful, as traditional car designers want to have."
We moved on to the design studio on the top floor, where jazzy house music played in the background. Some 65 designers and support staff report to Kim, and on the day of my visit, the team buzzed with excitement about the work being done. In addition to traditional automotive CAD modeling, the designers work with Oculus Rift and augmented reality.
Kim said he and his team made up the process for designing with new technology on the fly in order to meet their tight design deadlines. "We’re doing things super fast in a third of the time that I am used to," says Kim. We’re still doing it high-quality and it’s giving new insight to see things immediately," he says. "We’re using the technology as it’s being developed. You see designers with a VR headset and they are pointing in space." Everyone I spoke to at the company said they feel a sense of freedom to do things that they couldn’t do at other companies, which clearly is helping to motivate them — even on that late Friday afternoon, the designers seemed focused. They’d better; for now, Faraday still doesn’t have a product, and the financial mathematics of the car business are brutal. Just ask Elon Musk.