LeEco's Car Partner Unveiled a New Car, But Production Is Still Nowhere in Sight | Live From CES

The American company that can't shake off its ties to LeEco failed to use its new car to prove it has the technology.

This morning, in the north of Las Vegas, Faraday Future held a press conference at a venue built around a racetrack and showed off what it called its first mass-production electric car.

Since LeEco's crisis, Faraday Future — the LeEco auto partner that Jia Yueting invested in — has come under heavy scrutiny in the United States too. Its half-built factory has stopped work over unpaid bills, a Nevada state official has called it part of a LeEco Ponzi scheme, and 8 of its 14 executives left within a year.

This event mattered not only to Faraday Future. It was also a chance for LeEco to show the world it could still build cars. Jia Yueting came in person.

But over more than 90 minutes, the event covered everything except proof that the company can build a car.

According to the executives on stage, Faraday Future is like no other company on Earth. Its new product, the FF91 electric car, is neither a sports car nor an SUV but a "new species." A slide on the giant screen called it the biggest technological breakthrough for humanity since the internet.

The car is piled with every technology you can think of. Some of it concerns driving — lidar, autonomous driving. Some of it is not what carmakers usually care to talk about, such as Cat.6 LTE in-car networking and 802.11ac Wi-Fi. Oh, and there is a "Central Brain," said to be the most advanced platform ever put in a car.

By the end, the event looked more and more like a LeEco press conference. Jia Yueting took the stage to give a speech and show off the product, and the actor Sun Honglei, who often turns up to cheer him on, sat in the audience.

"Reshaping history." "Creating the future." "Reinventing the auto industry." The seats are "zero gravity," the car you can reserve is the "Alliance Edition" (the "Dream Partner Edition"), and all of a user's data lives in an FFID. The vocabulary sounded more and more like LeEco's ecosystem talk.

One thing was different from LeEco's events back home: hundreds of reporters came, but the press section barely applauded all night. Meanwhile, a group on the left side of the audience let out cheers, claps and screams right on cue with the speeches on stage. If the livestream made the room sound excited, that group was doing the work.

In the end, the only production detail about the FF91 was that it will be limited to 300 units, delivered in 2018. As at LeEco's LeSEE launch, there were no test rides. Everyone could only photograph the prototype — said to be entirely handmade — from behind a barrier a meter away.

The Only Technology Seriously Discussed Was How Fast It Takes Off

Ever since Faraday Future released test videos of the car it calls the FF91, the selling point it has pushed is speed.

The stage was built as a racetrack several hundred meters long. A Bentley Mulsanne, a Ferrari 488 GTB, a Tesla Model S and the FF91 each ran from one end to the other in turn. The audience could only watch the cars go by one at a time, but according to the data Faraday Future supplied, the FF91 beat the Tesla Model S by 0.01 seconds.

Faraday Future says the FF91 goes from 0 to 100 km/h in 2.39 seconds, has a battery capacity of 130 kilowatts and a range of more than 700 kilometers. The car carries a 3D lidar, 10 high-definition cameras, 13 long- and short-range radars and 12 ultrasonic sensors to enable autonomous driving. Faraday Future also plans to build a supercharging network like Tesla's.

From the test videos and the figures various carmakers publish, the FF91's 0-to-100 time really is fast. But that proves very little, and none of the other numbers can be verified right now.

To make an electric car fast, all you need is a finished basic body structure plus a strong motor and battery. If the car only has to appear for a few seconds on a stage and in a video, the way Faraday's does, it doesn't even need a big battery.

Faraday is not alone. Nearly every electric-car startup sells speed. In principle, an electric car has no complicated transmission; even NIO, which unveiled a supercar not long ago, follows a Tesla-like design, putting the battery in the chassis and building the body around the chassis and powertrain.

NIO, another Chinese startup, took its prototype to the Nürburgring and set a time no electric car had managed before. The Nürburgring is more than ten kilometers long, so running it flat out also tested part of the car's range. Faraday Future's FF91 demonstration couldn't even show that much.

Faraday didn't seem confident showing the FF91 off, either. A fence ringed the car on static display, and we could only look at it from a meter away — sitting inside it or touching it was out of the question. We could shoot the cockpit only through the glass; it looked flashy, full of screens. In fact, in Faraday's own promotional videos, every shot of an FF91 driving on a road looks like CG rather than a real car.

Two Cars Showed Up, Both Still Handmade, and the Details Differ Sharply

Faraday Future's car is not a traditional four-door sedan, nor an MPV or an SUV. As Faraday puts it, it is a new kind of product that combines the practicality of a sedan with the space of an SUV, and to be fair, details like the lights show some imagination and a sense of the future.

But the two cars that appeared were not the same in their details.

Faraday Future first sent a prototype racing across the racetrack-shaped venue after the Bentley, the Ferrari and the Tesla. Then it had Jia Yueting drive another one onto the stage.

The first car was in view briefly — less than a minute in all. The second was the one left out for people to examine.

The two cars share an exterior design. But look closely at the prototype that sped past and the gap where the rear door meets the body is badly uneven. Next to the prototype on static display, its shell looks lumpy and the workmanship rough. It does not look ready for mass production; at most it is a prototype whose exterior design has been settled.

The FF91 Jia Yueting drove on stage was far more refined. Judging by the headlights, taillights, body panels, paint and the small display between the front and rear doors, this car's exterior got dedicated attention. It was a presentable prototype.

Faraday Future has no factory of its own yet. The promotional video played at the event even counted the machining of clay models — used to check the exterior design — as part of the manufacturing it showed.

Staff at the event said these prototypes are handmade for now. Given how Faraday staged the demonstration, it is fair to conclude that the prototype used for the speed test and the one on static display are not at the same stage of development.

One detail of the FF91 looks suspect: a retractable lidar mounted at the front of the car. Faraday Future says the lidar is for autonomous driving.

Set aside the fact that the lidar occupies front-end space that could have been storage — one of Tesla's selling points. Mounting it that low means the car's own body blocks the lidar's view. What could have been 360 degrees now looks almost straight ahead only.

Other companies put the lidar on the roof of their self-driving prototypes, or fit several small units on the sides, to solve the field-of-view problem.

The bigger question, of course, is why the lidar is there at all. Mainstream lidar units cost tens of thousands of dollars today, and even the cheapest run several thousand. No company has put one on a production car.

Inconsistency Ran Through the Whole Event

All evening, Faraday Future's promotional material and what actually happened kept diverging.

In an early segment on automatic parking, the big screen showed an FF91 prototype finding a gap in a row of cars and parking itself, the whole thing smooth. Technically it looked almost identical to videos Tesla had shown before, and very finished.

Then Jia Yueting drove the car on stage and everything changed.

Nick Sampson, Faraday Future's vice president of research and development, pulled Jia Yueting over to demonstrate automatic parking. Jia pressed a button near the front door, and the three men on stage watched expectantly, hoping the car would drive itself to the center of the stage and stop. After a short, awkward pause, the FF91 prototype had done nothing at all.

After the demo failed, the three executives would not try again. They skipped the segment with a joke: "Our car seems a bit lazy."

Even setting that aside, the demo would have been strange had it worked. Plenty of cars park themselves, including several Teslas, which steer automatically into a space.

But the feature Jia Yueting was trying to show off was running on an empty stage. Was the FF91 meant to park itself in a space no one could see?

Even If Everything Worked as Shown, a Car at This Price Can't Save a Startup in Crisis

A day before the event, Reuters reported that Faraday Future's first production car is planned to go on sale in 2018 at $150,000 to $200,000. A second product is planned for mass production in 2019, priced and positioned like the Tesla Model S and Model X — $50,000 to $100,000. By 2020 Faraday Future will mass-produce a third, cheaper car, and by 2026 the company will have launched more than a dozen products.

Launching an expensive, cutting-edge product to prove yourself and then relying on cheaper ones for volume may well work; Tesla, another electric-car maker, has more or less taken that path. But as Faraday Future's first product, the price is absurd.

The hottest $200,000-class cars of 2016, as listed by American auto media, come almost entirely from brands with a century or more of history — the Bentley Flying Spur, the Rolls-Royce Phantom, the Lamborghini Huracán LP 600-4, the Ferrari 488 GTB, the Aston Martin Rapide S — products that sit far outside the ordinary idea of a car.

A "distinctive design language," a "big-displacement engine," even the selling point of "tiny production runs": at that level, it takes all of that to stay competitive.

As a product, Tesla's first car, the Roadster, released in 2008, was also "shockingly expensive." This electric car, converted from the Lotus Elise sports car, cost more than $100,000 at the time, about $120,000 in today's money. The Roadster won plenty of awards in 2008 because it was the first electric car to do 0 to 100 km/h in 3.7 seconds while going more than 300 kilometers on a charge.

But Tesla did not survive on the Roadster. In 2008 it announced a production model, the Model S; in 2010 it listed on Nasdaq; in 2012 it launched the Model X; in March 2016 it formally announced the cheap Model 3.

Tesla still loses money in most quarters. It raises cash by issuing bonds, selling more shares and selling off carbon-emission credits, and the "future" it describes in public is built entirely around the cheap Model 3. The Model 3 costs about $42,000 and took more than 400,000 reservations after its launch. Tesla hopes mass-producing it will throw off enough profit to cover the earlier spending and make the company profitable.

The FF91 Faraday unveiled today leaves the company a very long way from becoming a company that actually builds cars at scale.

This Company, Tied to LeEco, May Not Have Much Time Left

Faraday Future's fame in the Chinese-speaking world seems to have little to do with its products. Every conversation so far has revolved around Jia Yueting and his LeEco.

In 2014, LeEco announced its "Super Car" plan, to build cars with BAIC. In September 2015, "LeEco Super Car" hired Ding Lei, former general manager of Shanghai GM, as CEO of LeEco's auto business. But back in April 2015, reports said a car company called Faraday Future had been founded in California, with LeEco boss Jia Yueting as its founding investor.

That set off speculation. Many reports treated Faraday Future as simply LeEco's American car brand and subsidiary. In fact, until May 2016 this electric-car company — which had shown a concept car at CES 2016 — never responded to the speculation about LeEco. At the 2016 Beijing Auto Show, Faraday Future's booth sat right next to LeEco's car booth, and for a long time Faraday Future never clarified its real relationship with LeEco.

In May 2016, Faraday Future said that because both companies were founded by Jia Yueting, it worked closely with LeEco and could use LeEco's technology. But it said Faraday's electric cars had nothing to do with LeEco's.

In November 2016, reports revealed that the factory Faraday Future was preparing to build in Nevada was short of money and hard to keep going. Nevada's commerce director then attacked Faraday sharply, calling it a "Ponzi scheme." Soon after, LeEco ran into serious trouble of its own. That same November, Jia Yueting published a letter to employees saying LeEco faced enormous difficulties, and admitting that its expansion — cars included — had gone too fast and hit funding problems.

At that point Faraday again invited reporters to tour its US headquarters, but the point of the trip was essentially to insist that the company and LeEco were not one and the same. Faraday said it was not a LeEco subsidiary, that LeEco was only one of its investors, and that the two companies cooperated on technology and nothing more.

Sina Tech's report on that visit contained some odd details. Among the photos Faraday gave the press was one of two staff members working around a LeEco television. Faraday Future's explanation: its headquarters "uses LeEco TVs throughout." An American car startup was advertising its relationship with a Chinese internet company.

The facts suggest the two companies are far closer than Faraday has said. Jia Yueting's presence at the event says enough on its own. LeTV's site put a large teaser and a livestream link on the front page of its auto channel.

LeEco, it seems, cares a great deal about the future of a company it has "nothing to do with."

After the press conference, reporters swarmed Peter Savagian, Faraday Future's vice president of powertrain. When we asked about the relationship with LeEco, Savagian told us only: "We've said it many times — it's a strategic partnership."

A string of questions about production and how the company is run produced no answers either.

Asked where the suppliers are and whether the Las Vegas factory will make parts or only assemble them, Savagian said someone else would address that later and that he could not announce anything now.

Asked about the debts, he said Faraday Future is a startup, that suppliers and contractors have been helping build the factory, and that the factory's problems are being worked through.

Meanwhile, the official livestream on FF.com cut back to a studio in China, where a guest said: "You can tell — they're really rolling up their sleeves and building cars."

Cover image and in-article photos by QDaily.