It’s taken almost six years, but a factory set up in a former tire manufacturing plant in Hanford, California, has started production of its first electric vehicles for delivery to customers.
Faraday Future, founded in 2014 with a goal to compete in the high-end luxury electric vehicle market against the likes of Ferrari and Maybach, unveiled the first production body of its flagship FF 91 Futurist crossover in a ceremony last week at its FF ieFactory on Idaho Avenue, south of Hanford, California.
Company executives rolled the car body — without motors, batteries, wheels, seats and other interior systems and features — out of the paint shop on a large cart to applause from assembled employees inside the factory on March 29.
“We have built many ‘production intention’ vehicles here in the last year,” Faraday Future CEO Xuefeng “XF” Chen told workers, referring to versions of the vehicle produced for testing the car, its powerplant and technology systems. “But this is the first production-built (vehicle) to come off the line process here in Hanford.”
“I cannot wait to see this vehicle on the road being driven by my first customer very soon,” Chen added.
Faraday Future has been taking pre-orders with $1,500 deposits for the FF 91 Futurist since the vehicle concept was unveiled at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2017.
The start of production “is a huge, pivotal moment for us as it represents a final stepping stone toward upscaled production and delivery of vehicles to our users, who have waited patiently for this moment,” said Chen, who became the company’s CEO in November. The company expects the first vehicles to be delivered to buyers by the end of April.
Company founder Yueting “YT” Jia told employees that the start of production “marks FF’s most solid step as a disruptor of the traditional luxury automotive civilization … epitomized by Ferrari and Maybach.”
FF 91 model designed to compete with Ferrari, Tesla
The FF 91 (as in “nine-one,” not “ninety-one”) Futurist is a fully electric vehicle built with autonomous self-driving and self-parking technology, with an EPA-certified range of 381 miles on a battery charge. Three motors provide 1,050 horsepower and, global production vice president Mattias Aydt said, propel the car from zero to 60 mph in 2.27 seconds.
Company representatives did not respond to queries from The Fresno Bee about number of employees at the Hanford plant, production goals, vehicle pricing and other details. But in a 2022 report to Faraday Future investors and shareholders, the company indicated that the price for each of the 300 invitation-only, limited-edition, ultra-high-end Alliance model of the FF 91 Futurist was expected to be $250,000.
Target pricing for other versions were starting from $180,000 for the FF 91 Futurist and from $120,000 for the “basic” FF 91 — potentially more direct rivals in price to established electric vehicle maker Tesla’s Model S luxury sedan. Tesla recently cut the price of its Model S sedan and Model X SUV.
The factory production capacity at Hanford was disclosed to investors as about 10,000 vehicles per year. But Jia acknowledged “the fact that our production capacity falls far behind the market demand.”
Phil Bethell, Faraday Future’s vice president of vehicle line engineering, said that the company’s teams have constantly refined and enhanced the technology and systems in the FF 91, while keeping the streamlined exterior relatively unchanged from its original design. “I can promise you on the inside it’s a completely new vehicle,” Bethell said.
The process has included putting pre-production specimens of the car through their paces in test labs and on-road performance testing, he added.
“The vehicles coming out of Hanford will truly embody the soul of FF,” Bethell said. “It’s all electric, it’s autonomous-ready, it’s seamlessly connected, and it has all our latest advancements in performance, intelligence and user experience.”
Faraday Future has history of financial distress and first vehicle caught fire
What is now the Faraday Future ieFactory – the “i” stands for intelligence, the “e” for electric – began its life in 1962 as the Armstrong Rubber Company and later became Pirelli Armstrong Tire Co. When the tire plant closed in early 2001, about 850 workers lost their jobs.
Faraday Future signed its lease for the 1.1 million-square-foot factory in August 2017. At that time, the company said it anticipated eventually hiring up to 1,300 workers to run the factory in three shifts around the clock, with the start of production for the FF 91 planned for 2018.
But that production date slipped repeatedly — first to 2019, then 2020, then 2021 and 2022 — as the company struggled to secure the financing it needed to get manufacturing off the ground.
Early on, there was a dispute with a Chinese company that had pledged to invest $2 billion in the start-up enterprise. Later, in 2019, the company’s founder, Chinese businessman Yueting “YT” Jia, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in California because of personal debts in China. While the company repeatedly issued public statements that Jia’s bankruptcy would not affect Faraday Future’s business operations, the legal process appeared to complicate the company’s efforts to line up more of the financing needed to accelerate the outfitting of the Hanford factory and the start of production.
A restructuring plan for Jia’s debts in 2020 “removes the biggest hurdle in FF’s equity financing efforts,” the company reported.
There were other potential complications as well. The first pre-production prototype of the FF 91 caught fire in September 2018 shortly after it was shown to Faraday Future employees and their families in a company event at the Hanford factory.
And in 2021, the company failed to file one of its quarterly financial reports to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in time, prompting NASDAQ to notify Faraday Financial that it was out of compliance with the exchange’s rules and could be subject to being deslisted from the exchange.
Changes in leadership also kept progress in flux. Jia stepped down as CEO as he went through his bankruptcy process, replaced by Carsten Breitfeld, a former executive with BMW. Breitfeld was fired as CEO in November 2022 and resigned from the company’s board, and Chen — who spent 20 years in the auto industry with Ford, Mazda, and Jaguar Land Rover — was appointed to take over the company’s leadership.
Jia, the company’s founder and former CEO, remains with Faraday Future as its chief product and user ecosystem officer.
Faraday Future remains on the NASDAQ exchange under the stock symbol FFIE, but its share price Thursday of 29 cents per share is close to its all-time low of 25 cents in early December 2022. The company’s shares had traded for as much as $18.45 per share in early 2021.
The start of production “shows that FF has entered a new phase under the governance and operation of the new board and management,” Jia said last week. “We believe FF will quickly restore its due value (in) the marketplace.”
In a July 2021 statement, the company reported that all 300 of its invitation-only reservations for its ultra-high-end FF 91 Futurist Alliance edition had been booked with deposits of $5,000 each.
The news agency Reuters reported in November that Faraday Future had 369 pre-orders for its FF 91s, down from almost 400 refundable, non-binding deposits in mid-2022.
