The start-up hasn’t even started production of the FF91 yet, but has already announced the FF81 to be built in Korea. Faraday Future is also one of those start-ups that have been declared dead several times and then keep going and pulling a new “rabbit” out of the hat when interest threatens to ebb completely. With the production of the electric crossover FF91, the company is far behind the original plans: they actually wanted to start in 2019, once in a new factory north of Las Vegas. Since the new building was too expensive, it was decided to use an ex-Pirelli factory in Hanford, California, as the production site.
Faraday Future has given more than 14,000 pre-orders for the FF91, but according to the Ecoreporter platform, there were only a few hundred that were actually paid for and were therefore binding. Accordingly, the information on the reservations was “possibly misleading,” said Faraday Future in a statement to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. In fact, only “a few hundred of these reservations were prepaid” – the remaining pre-orders were merely “unpaid expressions of interest”. Another setback for the company, which finally wanted to start series production of the FF91 in the third quarter of 2022. Therefore, the chairman of the supervisory board, Brian Krolicki, had to step down. The salaries of CEO Carsten Breitfield and company co-founder Jia Yueting were cut by 25 percent. The Faraday Future share, which is only traded on the US stock exchange Nasdaq, has lost a lot of value: The start-up only made it onto the US technology exchange in July 2021 and was thus able to collect around one billion dollars in fresh capital. Enough to finally get the FF91 into production.
A more affordable mass-market electric car, which could be called the FF81, was also announced for 2024. This model is to be produced by the South Korean contract manufacturer Myoung Shin. However, Faraday did not provide any more detailed information about the FF81.
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