Faraday Future Plans To Launch An Electric Car By 2017

Although most people had never heard of the company until very recently, there is now a significant buzz developing about Faraday Future, an electric car startup that’s claiming it will bring a new high-tech car to the market by 2017.

Faraday Future was founded in California in 2014, and it has stayed completely off the radar until now. The company occupies the former Nissan research and design building in Garena, California has 200 employees, and is currently hiring 10 more every week, according to Motor Trend. Faraday Future expects to have 300 employees by 2016.

The company’s goal to put an electric car on sale by 2017 seems quite bold, considering the fact it hasn’t secured a factory yet, and the reality that there have been many examples in the past of upstart automakers that bite off more than they could chew in the highly complex business of cars. At the same time, FF, as the company likes to be called, appears to have assembled a strong team of designers and engineers, including employees who worked on BMW’s “i” electric car program, the Chevrolet Volt program, and at Tesla, as well as at Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The company’s impressive lineup has even skeptics admitting Faraday has the potential to be a contender.

“Everyone in the industry knows the caliber of team we’re building here,” Faraday representative Marcus Nelson told The Hollywood Reporter. “We’re a well-funded company.”

Nelson said the company is evaluating sites for manufacturing its car in California, Nevada, Louisiana and Georgia, and that it will make a final decision later this year.

The rough outline for the production car FF has disclosed is impressive. It will feature 15 percent greater specific energy than a Tesla Model S with an 85-kilowatt-hour battery pack, which works out to a battery pack size of 98 kWh. The Model S can go up to 270 miles on a charge, so perhaps the FF car will be able to go even further.

Like Tesla’s, the battery pack will be divided into many individual cells, but it will be designed so individual cells or groups of cells can be replaced. Currently, on other electric cars, the failure of a group of cells typically means that the entire pack has to be replaced. This expensive proposition will be able to be avoided with FF’s car, which could be a key selling point for the company when it comes time to market its product.

“Right now, technology in cars tends to be a patchwork,” said Nelson. “We wanted to figure out all the connectivity: mobile devices, automation. What if you build a car from the ground up with the future in mind?”

FF will almost certainly face many obstacles as it moves forward to put its electric car on sale. Building a new car is extremely difficult and expensive, with even established automakers often choosing to rely on existing components as much as possible.

Although Tesla has illustrated it’s possible for a startup to make a great new car, they are the exception as opposed to the rule. It’s certainly possible FF will turn out to be the next Tesla, but it could instead become the next Coda or Fisker.