Remember Faraday Future? Apparently, it's still a thing

If, unlike us, your memory hasn’t been completely turned to mush by the onslaught of the past few years, you’ll remember a company by the name of Faraday Future.

You might even recall, if you’ve got an exceptionally good memory, that we went over the pond to visit Faraday and check out its first car, a 1000bhp 'ultra luxury EV’ called the FF 91.

As you might expect, we found that Faraday was home to the three main start-up EV company tropes: staff with serious CVs, rooms full of serious tech and some seriously American-spec optimism. And we’ll leave you to guess which one of those was behind the promise that the FF 91 was due to enter production the following year. As it happened, the year we visited was 2017, and as calendars will remorselessly indicate, we are not currently in 2018.

But now, Faraday has revealed its first pre-production FF 91 “for final engineering validation and certification”, which suggests that the company is not out for the count just yet. Faraday also promises it’s the first of “several” pre-production vehicles built to get the tick of approval both internally and from the powers that be, which is the last step before the “start of production in Q3 2022”.

To say that Faraday Future’s taken a long and difficult road to get here could be something of an understatement. As befits a long and difficult road, there’s a long and difficult tale to go with it, but we’re not exactly economists so we’ll just stick to the highlights: a factory that was never built, the founder declaring personal bankruptcy, a business publication using the phrase "drowning in debt", enough lawsuits to keep hundreds of suits practising law and the formation of at least one entirely new start-up by former Faraday Future staffers.