The man who "returned home next week" came again, this time with the FF 91 "quasi-production car".
At 8:00 a.m. Beijing time on February 24, Faraday Future held a "quasi-production car" roll-off ceremony for the first model FF 91 at its Hanford plant in California.
"Quasi-production car", a "quasi" word indicates that this car is different from the final mass production version and cannot be delivered. However, with its off-line, FF 91 can open a large number of compliance tests and production verification, and looks like it is another step towards final mass production and delivery.
From the "PPT car" at the beginning of its establishment to the recent order fraud, Faraday Future can be said to have been accompanied by doubts all the way. Today, in 2022, the maturity of the electric vehicle industry has made us rarely question whether a car company can build a mass production car, but more worried about whether its products, positioning, and market are suitable.
However, for Jia Yueting and his Faraday Future, it may be an exception.
Therefore, when Jia Yueting shouted at the off-line ceremony of the FF 91 quasi-production car, "The dream we are fighting for is getting closer and closer, becoming a reality", do you think that Lao Jia and FF are about to make their dreams come true?
From "Quasi-production Vehicles" to "Mass Production Vehicles"
How long do we have to wait?
How long does it take for a new model to go from launch to mass production?
The FF 91 took 5 years, from its initial debut to today's "quasi-production car" rolling off the production line.
In 2017, when the FF 91 debuted at CES, it had to be said that the avant-garde design, the performance of the explosion and the intelligent configuration still shocked many people that year. To this day, there are still colleagues in GeekCar's office who reminisce about the surprise of seeing the FF 91 for the first time.
Comparable to the top sports car's 1050 horsepower (783kW), 0~60mph acceleration of 2.39 seconds; integrated battery, powertrain system, trapezoidal inverter modular driveable chassis architecture; 130kWh battery pack, the FF91's range under NEDC conditions to reach 700 km... These endurance and power parameters are still very competitive today.
In terms of intelligence, the FF 91 is powered by NVIDIA DRIVE Orin System-on-Chip (SoC) and Velodyne's first solid-state lidar, the Velarray H800. As early as 2016, FF, which obtained the California autonomous driving test license, is now unable to fully develop the automatic driving system, but it still has L2+ level automatic driving functions. The rear is equipped with a 27-inch display and patented connectivity modules, which also meet the needs of passengers in the rear for video conferencing or entertainment.
At the same time, this quasi-production car has also made certain changes in design, such as new front and rear lights, the roof reserved overhead lidar position, a new livery, and the FF logo under the doors on both sides.
From the perspective of performance, intelligent experience and even appearance, the FF 91, which is 5 years late, can still compete with the Model S Plaid, Lucid Air, HiFi X, which are equally positioned electric vehicles. But looking at the price, the competitiveness becomes less rosy.
According to Faraday Future CEO Bi Fukang, the price of this car will be higher than 200,000 US dollars (about 1.262 million yuan), and if it enters China, the price may reach more than 2 million yuan.
What is the concept of $200,000? The BMW 3 Series and Mercedes-Benz C-Class that we are familiar with are priced at about $30,000 in the United States, while the Maybach GLS with a 4.0T V8 engine is priced at just over $200,000 in the United States.
No wonder at this conference, FF 91 has been compared with Maybach many times, "100 kilometers acceleration is faster than Maybach", "rear seat space is larger than Maybach"....It turns out that the price of these two cars is comparable. However, with the acceleration ability of pure electric vehicles and fuel vehicles, Tian Ji did not dare to race horses like this.
Compared with the pure electric vehicle with close positioning of FF 91, Lucid Air Dream is priced at $165,000, HiFi X is "inexpensive" at a price of 600,000 to 800,000 yuan in China, and the price of FF 91 is enough to buy two Model S Plaids.
Of course, since it is to take the high-end route, it is not interesting to calculate the cost performance, and people sell the brand premium. So let's first see when the car will be produced?
At the launch ceremony of the FF 91 quasi-production car, Bi Fukang and Jia Yueting both vowed that the FF 91 would be delivered in the third quarter. Still, the environment of the conference raised questions about the timing of delivery.
In the footage of the off-line ceremony, we did not see the molded production line in the Hanford, California factory, which was still in the construction stage, although many equipment was in place. And just three months ago, the delivery time given by FF official is still July this year, and the delivery time given a year ago is the first half of this year...
This familiar rhythm, no wonder some netizens left a message under the official Weibo of FF: "In the end, FF 91 will be mass-produced first?" Or will my ofo deposit be returned first?"
FF 91 deadline,
Jia Yueting's life-saving straw?
A year ago, when Faraday Future went public through SPAC, many people cheered "he is back". After all, in the eyes of Jia Yueting and the supporters of FF, the FF 91 design passed, the technical patent threshold is too strong, and the difference is only the funds: "As long as you have money, you can build the car."
However, from Sun Hongbin, who stepped on Xiangyun with tens of billions of feet in his hands, to Xu Jiayin, who came to the rescue with 800 million, and then to the investment of Geely Holdings, FF has not lacked the favor of capital all the way. On the day FF successfully landed on the NASDAQ, the issue price per share was $13.78, and the opening rose to $16.8. The brief highlight brought FF about a billion dollars in financing, and also made Bi Fukang claim on the conference call that the company had sufficient funds to complete the FF 91 project.
However, in reality, whether it is retail investors or institutions, the trust in Faraday's future has been worn away in negative news again and again.
After experiencing the "debut is the peak" listing, FF's stock price has fallen all the way. Even the news that today's FF 91 quasi-production car rolled off the production line did not stir up much splash. Today, FF's market value is only one-third of the IPO valuation, and the market value of 1.5 billion US dollars is less than one-tenth of Wei Xiaoli's, not to mention the Tesla that Jia Yueting vowed to target. This is more due to the crisis of trust caused by frequent ticket hopping in the past, and the economic crisis that has always accompanied Faraday's future.
In October 2021, J Capital Research, a US short-selling agency, released a 28-page short-selling report, questioning R&D investment, production capacity, capital operation, etc., and believing that "FF can't sell a single car". The reason is that they visited FF's Hanford plant in California three times from August to September 2021, but found that the factory showed no signs of production.
In this regard, Jia Yueting replied in his personal circle of friends at the time: "Cold rice is hot and fried, nonsense."
However, combined with the factories displayed at the off-line ceremony of today's quasi-production vehicles, the production line is still not yet formed, and the conclusion that "there is no sign of production" from August to September last year is not hanging in the air.
In addition to the doubts about the production plant, not long ago, the short-selling agency also questioned the order of FF 91. Previously, Faraday Future announced that the number of orders for FF 91 reached 14,000, and the survey found that 78% of them came from the same private company, and the value of the orders was as high as $1.96 billion, which were converted into notes payable at an annual rate of 8% as early as 2020. In all the orders, only a few hundred people were actually paid. In this regard, the official response of FF is: 14,000 is a "free booking form", so there is no payment information; 300 copies are a limited edition "paid booking form".
I don't know if this explanation will convince you, but investors don't seem to be convinced.
Along with the crisis of trust, there is also the economic crisis of FF itself. According to the IPO submissions filed by FF last July, $1.4 billion was still needed before FF 91 mass production. In addition, they also have to recruit employees on a large scale, improve sales channels, promote factory construction, and even recruit troops in China.
Since last year's IPO raised about a billion US dollars, FF has not had enough information to attract investment and increase stock prices for most of the year. Therefore, with the delivery time of FF 91 pushed forward again and again, is this "quasi-production car" off the production line ceremony at the right time?
However, even if the FF 91 starts production and delivery in the third quarter of this year as scheduled, the high-end route of more than $200,000 is doomed to the limited number of orders it can harvest. How can the funds brought by limited orders support FF to continue to go on, to the lower price and larger scale of FF 81 mass production in 2024?
Of course, considering these prerequisites, the FF 91 can be mass-produced as scheduled.
At last
In 2022, Jia Yueting and Faraday Future, who have been building cars for seven years and ten months, finally appeared with his "quasi-production car"; the creditors who held IOUs at that time also became shareholders of FF overnight because of Jia Yueting's personal bankruptcy, and became "brothers" in the same trench on Jia Yueting's car-making road, "suffocating" for the same dream.
But today's electric vehicle field is different from a few years ago. Users have more products with relatively mature technology and good prices to choose from, and the capital has more new car investment targets from different fields and more trustworthy.
And FF 91 is like Jia Yueting's last straw, after all, the story of "wolf is coming" always does not work.
So, when will Boss Jia return to China?