Faraday Future’s big CES unveiling of its first production car, the FF91, was over-the-top in many ways, but nothing typified the company’s trouble bridging the gap between hype and reality than the moment when the company’s main Chinese investor pressed the button to prompt the car to park itself... and nothing happened.
Minutes before, the company had shown off live video of a camouflaged prototype parking itself in the lot outside the venue in downtown Las Vegas. The moment went off without a hitch, but when the car was asked to perform a similar move on stage in front of hundreds of skeptical on-lookers, the FF91 got gun shy.
“As a new baby, she's very very timid,” said Nick Sampson, vice president of engineering. A short time later, the car got over the nerves it was apparently facing earlier, and began to inch across stage with no one in the driver seat — but the damage was already done.
Compounding the embarrassment was the fact that the car went on the fritz under the watchful gaze of Jia Yueting, founder of LeEco, billionaire, and FF’s main investor. Many of the questions about FF stem from Jia and his undefined control over the California-based company. So for the car to fail under his touch is a moment rife with corporate symbolism.
After the event, Sampson tried to explain why the car failed during such a crucial moment. “It’s a complex situation,” he said. “We knew there were technical challenges. If you look up at the roof of this building, there’s a lot of structure up there that inhibits some of the signals the car needs to be able to self drive.”
A reporter asked if the car was being operated via remote control, a reference to a previous report exposing LeEco’s use of remote control to operate its LeSee concept car. “If it was on remote control,” Sampson scoffed, “then the person controlling it would have corrected that.”
Comments
This is a very high stakes failed Kickstarter.
By cloudform on 01.04.17 1:21am
I know I’ve heard this guy somewhere before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJMRxbECzow
By flathunt on 01.04.17 3:09am
I was thinking of this: https://youtu.be/_bY0fdgpISc?t=20s
By Ivan03 on 01.04.17 8:58am
…..feel sorry for them ><
ps. went to their website…kindda hard to navigate
By Mr.Mulderfox on 01.04.17 4:01am
Just like the car
By aditya.ravishankar on 01.04.17 4:13am
It’s weird but I could navigate it. Now my biggest issue is the whole site is nothing but hype, hype hype! "Car designed in VR! Our design and engineering teams have synergy! Hype!" Jesus, sell me on the car and it’s features, not some random buzz words.
By The_Falcoholic on 01.04.17 10:33am
Sweet mother of god. You’re right – that site content is ghastly!
By llort on 01.04.17 11:05am
I learned nothing of the car features and everything about the hype surrounding the development of the car. What a load of crap. This car company is nothing more than a caricature of Tesla.
By The_Falcoholic on 01.06.17 10:06am
Yeah I gave up trying to figure it out.
By Eldaino on 01.07.17 12:17am
Competition is good and hope they succeed but again don’t get it why you have to make such a Spaceship when people need a normal car. I get it, you sell expensive ones first and later cheap, but still think it’s a bit odd. And all this speed stuff is for who? Drag race enthusiasts? Rich people who want to tune them and turn them into gold editions? For such compact battery technology, kind of a huge car I would say.
By raresh on 01.04.17 5:05am
This company has no real strong leadership to guide it. They are a hype machine. I’d rather Nissan made a new all electric car to compete with Tesla.
By The_Falcoholic on 01.06.17 10:08am
This is not production model, so kinks like this is absolutely normal. I am surprised why some people want this project to fail. We need more competition in this space as this is one of the sectors where growth will happen the most.
By Rock1m1 on 01.04.17 5:19am
People don’t like it because it’s financed by a Chinese company unlike the patriotic Tesla.
By Rnet on 01.04.17 7:26am
I think people don’t like failed products. People seem to be be accepting new Android phone makers.
By tribexx on 01.04.17 8:55am
Not really. I hope this company gets replaced by a few more honest Chinese companies.
By The_Falcoholic on 01.04.17 10:38am
This company just seems like a huge scam. Burn it down to the ground, get the ashes out of the way, and let other, more honest companies come forward to compete.
By The_Falcoholic on 01.04.17 10:37am
I don’t know if people necessarily want FF to fail but they’ve had more than a few people abandon ship. More competition is fine. That presention overall yesterday could have used a little fine tuning.
By TCrimson05t on 01.04.17 2:18pm
The noxious cloud of self-hype might have something to do with it.
By pentachrism on 01.04.17 4:22pm
True, but I feel that you don’t take a model and show off something in one of the biggest tech events in the world to have it fail. The last thing you want is The Verge or another outlet to write about it. Especially when you are trying to sell the public on one of the hardest things to manufacture, a car.
By CrazyLance on 01.04.17 8:51pm
@AG47 I wish I could say the same to people who bash Tesla like its their job.
By Jeremy McGill on 01.04.17 10:11am
Chinese brands still think they are in China, where they cant do any wrong and the government will put blocks in front of established foreign brands.
By demirel on 01.04.17 11:25am
Yeah, the US government would never do that!
By badasscat1 on 01.04.17 12:56pm
The US government doesn’t do that. At all. I don’t know what narrative you’re trying to push but there’s literally nothing to back it up.
By Virge23 on 01.04.17 1:18pm
Either they suck at it or they aren’t doing it, as China is welcome to compete with us in every product category except smartphones (government seems really worried about Chinese phones giving China too much access to our wireless networks.)
By The_Falcoholic on 01.09.17 9:01am
sigh They are totally off the mark with this car. They’re trying to impress us with speed, luxuriousness and self-driving features, but I think that most people just want an affordable EV with long range. If Faraday really wants to compete with Tesla all they need to do is release a sub $35k EV with ~200mile range before the Model 3 comes out. They can add more expansive options later down the line. Musk needed to start with a luxury speedster because he needed to prove an EV can be fast and sexy and the tech was in its early stages, so expansive. We already know EVs can look good and drive well and the tech, while still relatively new, is getting cheaper and more accessible by the day. As soon as Musk opened up his patents FF should’ve been all over them, hammering down an affordable, good looking car with good range.
By 2late2die on 01.04.17 7:49pm