Faraday: “We’re not taking on Tesla”

A beat, and then a small chuckle. “Tesla and us are taking on the gasoline engine producers, along with anyone else. Why would we fight over the current one per cent of the EV market?

“We’re not taking on Tesla, no.” Those are the words of Nick Sampson, senior vice president and R&D chief of secretive new electric automotive start-up Faraday Future. 

You know the company. It’s the one that stole a significant amount of online real estate last week at the Consumer Electronics Show - the annual Las Vegas tech-fest - with the unveiling of a 1,000bhp, four-motor electric hypercar that theorises Veyron-levels of performance.

We say theorises, because as of yet, nothing has actually moved, but preliminary data of the ‘FFZERO1’ claims a 0-60mph time of less than three seconds, and a top speed in excess of 200mph.

Consider TG intrigued, then. “The car you see here [at CES] took four or five months from drawing board to this finished thing,” Nick explains to TG. “But this isn’t what we’ve been doing all the time though, this is just a project we did in our spare time.”

We’ll get to ‘what they’ve been doing all the time’ in a moment, because that FFZERO1 certainly is an interesting – if slightly optimistic – proposition. “This car came about because of the architecture we’re working on,” explains Nick. “When we started out on this programme one of the key elements from a core tech perspective was knowing that we wanted to produce a range of vehicles going forward.

“We came up with a platform that was adjustable and variable, and electric drive gives a great opportunity for that,” he says. The platform – it’s called VPA, for variable platform architecture, duh – can be stretched (it’s made from bonded aluminium), while the batteries are laid out in ‘strings’, meaning ‘it’s very easy to swap and change the number of strings without re-engineering the entire battery pack’.

“We’re not designing our own cells though,” Nick explains, “we’re working with the people like Panasonic, LG, Samsung and others."

Then comes the powertrain. The FFZERO1 concept at CES features four motors – inboard, not hub motors – powering each wheel. “From a dynamics point of view,” says Nick, “you can do things that would be unheard of in a gasoline engine car. You can, for example, control one of these motors within a few Nm of torque.

“You’d choose, basically, how much opposite lock you wanted,” he says with a laugh.

Faraday posits the theory that the idea behind this car – and it’s autonomous drive and connectivity – is that it could meet you at the race track, do a few autonomous laps to get the tyres warmed up, ‘and then you jump in’. Or indeed, it could show you the correct lines, and if you can’t replicate them, ‘the car will teach you how’.

It’s not going to get made, however. Nope. No chance. The reason for building such a futuristic, space-age piece of vapourware was to get attention and to trumpet that architecture. Speaking of that space-age design, it was lead designer Richard Kim’s doodle pad that provided the necessary spark.

“I was just walking around the office seeing how things were going, and on Richard’s desk was a doodle of a cool racing car,” Nick smiles. “I said to him, ‘that’s the sort of thing we should make’."

Over to Richard Kim. “The beauty of this platform is that it’s a blank canvas,” he says. “If you don’t have a legacy or history or heritage like us – you know, we don’t have 100 years or even ten years – you need a basis for where you extract the company values.” 

Richard explains to TG that though the FFZERO1 doesn’t preview any design DNA, it was important “to put the driver all the way forward”. There are a couple of tunnels underneath that run along the base of the car – “so it cools the battery so we get range” – while the body is made entirely from carbon; some raw, some painted. 

While Nick started from the platform, Richard began inside, working out. “We asked ‘where is the world going?’ and it’s all about the phone,” he explains. So there’s a phone that connects into the steering wheel, that faces just one seat.

“We’re not announcing the category of our first production car,” Richard smiles, “but it’s unique enough. And it’ll have more than one seat."

Ah yes, the first car from Faraday. Everyone is – as you’d expect – secretive. “We’re aiming to have our production cars on the road in a couple of years time,” explains Nick. “2017 or early 2018. If it’s done earlier we’ll just work on something else.”

They’re currently finishing up securing a bit of land in Las Vegas to open up a $1 billion factory – estimated to house 4,500 people when fully up and running – to build that first car. What on earth will it be? A supercar? SUV? Saloon? Coupe? Nick laughs. “The best thing I can tell you is that it’ll be a premium, large, exciting vehicle that carries more than one passenger.”

The strategy, according to Faraday, is to start large and posh, and work their way down the automotive food chain. “The platform allows us to work down faster than anyone else in the industry,” Nick says.

The FFZERO1’s VPA will underpin the first batch of medium-to large cars – allowing for over half a metre of wheelbase change – while a second platform will be introduced soon after for other sizes. And they’ll all be fully electric – no hybrids.

If at this point you’re thinking, ‘yeah yeah, it’s just pure fantasy, it’ll never happen’, consider this: Nick himself comes from Tesla, where he was the director of chassis and vehicle engineering. He joined at the beginning of the Model S programme and saw it through to completion, and worked on the Model X concept too. 

“We just think that the car companies of today are moving too slowly towards meeting the needs of a public that has become used to being connected and digital,” Nick says. Witness BMW and VW’s gesture control systems and the car world’s increasing awareness of being connected to the wider digital world, and you’ll see he has a point.

But it’s easy to say big things though, isn’t it? Faraday assures TG that “the people that have come to work here left really secure jobs”. Jobs in Apple, Tesla, and BMW, to name a few (Richard Kim was the lead designer on the i3 and i8).

Nick left us this with this sentiment: “Open your eyes and see the future.” 

Reckon they’ll deliver, and are you excited about the first car from Faraday Future?