Everybody is striving to create the most popular electric car, who knows what can happen in the next couple years?<\/p>\n
Faraday Future debuted a stunning electric vehicle concept at CES 2016 on Monday night. But Tesla can do a lot between now and 2018 (or thereabouts) when Faraday plans to bring out a real car.<\/p>\n
Executives from Faraday Future, the\u00a0Chinese billionaire-backed\u00a0startup,were dropping buzzy-sounding ideas like Variable Platform Architecture, battery strings, and \u201caero-tunnels\u201d Monday night.\u00a0Jia Yueting, the billionaire founder and chief executive of LeTV \u2014 a Chinese media company with a market value of over ten billion dollars \u2014 is putting down some serious bucks. He\u2019s one of the principals investing $1 billion in a 3 million square foot manufacturing facility on approximately 900 acres in North Las Vegas. The project would create 4,500 direct jobs on site.<\/p>\n
But the first production vehicle won\u2019t be here for \u201ca couple of years,\u201d as Nick Sampson, a senior vice president at Faraday and a former Tesla engineer, said on stage Monday night (to be fair, he used the word \u201conly\u201d when stating a couple of years and also had praise for Tesla: \u201cTesla andElon Musk\u00a0have created something we should all applaud them for\u201d). The challenge is, in a couple of years, the\u00a0Tesla Motors\u00a0TSLA -2.38%\u00a0Model X crossover will be a maturing platform and pouring out of Tesla factories. \u00a0And of course that\u2019s when the mass-market $35,000 Model 3 should hit the streets. And, needless to say, Tesla will have new car and technology announcements over the next couple of years.<\/p>\n
Faraday claims it\u2019s going to move fast and be able to crank out everything from FFZero1-like cars to SUVs to \u201ceven a pickup truck\u201d based on its Variable Platform Architecture (see video at bottom). The VPA includes a battery structure arranged into \u201cstrings\u201d \u2014 adding or removing strings changes the battery capacity and allows FF to develop new wheelbases. VPA also allows modular motor and power train configurations, including layouts with up to 4 motors and two or all-wheel drive systems.<\/p>\n