Today was Faraday Future’s big coming out event at CES 2016. The secretive company finally unveiled their first vehicle, but instead of it being a Tesla competitor, it’s a ridiculous concept car. The FFZero1 is a long, futuristic car with a glass roof, a fin on top, a massive mouth, honestly, it looks like another F1 prototype of the future.
The car itself may have been on stage, but the company spent far longer talking about how successful their hiring manger has been, instead of how the actual car works. Given the top of the vehicle is a glass dome like that of a fighter jet, there was no time spent talking about how you’d actually get into this thing, if it was actually ever built.
This car is not a sedan, it’s a single seater race car that’ll if ever built, would compete with the likes of Nissan ZEROD in the 24 Hours of LeMans, rather than ever roll down the streets.
Faraday Future’s big announcement was really a platform, an all electric platform which can be expanded and condensed to suit different vehicle types. It seems the only technical innovation may be an easily configurable electric battery system, one that can happily continue, even if some cells go bad.
While people lost their minds over this concept, keep in mind, plenty auto makers already have common platforms they ship different vehicles on. The fancy announcement video showed the vehicle structure expand, but there is no transformer here, that platform would still ship as standard categories, a sedan, SUV, pickup truck with different wheel basses.
Faraday Future who want to be called “FF”, have one big success and that’s hiring people from other auto makers and tech companies. They’ve already built the workforce up to 500 employees and have plans of adding another 4,500 as they start building vehicles in Nevada.
The car never got turned on today, indicating just how early this concept is. Basically its a shell that sat on stage. I got excited when they said we were going to ‘see the car in action’. This excitement quickly turned to disinterest, as the entire film was 3D animated. Creating animations of a concept, doesn’t at all demonstrate you can actually build a car, or a platform for the future of cars.
The website lists specs for the FFZero1 concept, which is a little like listing the specs of the flying cars in the Jetsons. They claim it’ll have 4 Quad Core Motors with over 1,000HP, 0-60 in less than 3 seconds and a top speed of over 200MPH. After just stepping out of the Model S, you should know those performance specs are available in the Model S, which you can buy today.
Perhaps the most ludicrous part of the concept is that you’ll get into this car and insert your smartphone into the steering wheel. FF didn’t speak about autonomous driving at all and this looks like a driver’s car, so the concept of having your phone right in front of you is insanity. If the car did have autonomy, then your phone is small at that distance.
I wish Faraday Future the best in their mission of changing transport, like Apple changed the smartphone. Right now I’m not convinced, not even close and today proved we’re still years from the company shipping their first consumer vehicle. If you think competitors are going to stand still while you get around to executing on everything you promised today, they won’t.
If you want to watch the video yourself, check it out below.