The Transport Guy: The startup trying to take on Tesla just flopped its first big announcement

Steve Kovach January 05, 2016 at 06:54AM

Faraday Future, the electric car startup with big ambitions of taking on Tesla and the rest of the auto industry, had a strange Monday night.

In a press conference ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, FF executives showed off a strange, futuristic concept car called the FFZERO1.

It looks like this:

Funky looks aside, keep in mind the vehicle shown Monday is just a concept. It has a lot of the same technology FF plans to use in its final production models, but that's about it. 

The real problem with Monday night's presentation was FF's loopy explanation for how it plans to use its platform to redefine the way we get around. Since they don't have much to show off now in terms of real technology, executives spent most of the keynote highlighting the pedigree of the 750 employees who are working on the project. The company is stuffed with engineers and designers that come from Tesla, BMW, Jaguar, and just about every other major car company.

Like these guys:

There were teaser videos. There were bold claims that FF could move faster than any other car company in history. There were grand comparisons to Apple, and that FF was about to do for transportation what the iPhone did for mobile computing.

But despite all those promises and all the hype, there was very little substance.

And the tech pundits on social media weren't buying it. Twitter exploded with skepticism throughout the event:

The archetype of a CES announcement: A thing nobody needs and nobody can buy that you promise will change the world https://t.co/i2ntuFmYjO

— Farhad Manjoo (@fmanjoo) January 5, 2016

 

Faraday Future kind of seems like it’s doing things other carmakers have done for years but insisting it’s really new?

— nilay patel (@reckless) January 5, 2016

 This one is a parody account, but echoes the sentiment from many:

My competition apparently. http://pic.twitter.com/0Bjge8ChUE

— Bored Elon Musk (@BoredElonMusk) January 5, 2016

 This tweet is referring to Apple's top-secret car project:

Faraday Future: We want to introduce the iPhone, but for the car. (Have you heard about something called Project Titan?)

— Neil Cybart (@neilcybart) January 5, 2016

And so on.

The critics do have a point. For a company making bold claims that it will reinvent transportation, the burden is on FF to show that it has the technology to live up to the promises it's making. So far it hasn't.

Still, we're a few years away from FF's first real production model. The company hopes to start selling it by 2020, around the same time Apple reportedly wants to start selling its car.

What FF really announced Monday was the platform it's using to make its electric cars a reality. It's claiming that it has a modular design that can turn the base model into just about any vehicle it wants — from a sports car to a pickup truck. That means it can move quickly and adapt to its customers' needs.

Oh, and it's also opening a $1 billion factory in Nevada.

In an interview a few weeks ago with Tech Insider, FF's head of research and development Nick Sampson (above) gave some more solid details on the company's vision. He said he sees FF acting more like a subscription service where you never really own a car, but pick up the vehicle for what you need at any given moment.

And in an interview with Business Insider after the press conference, Sampson responded to the early criticsim, insisting what the company is making isn't vaporware, or a product that'll never be released. He also said FF has test cars already on the road, but they're disguised to look like normal cars.

It'll be several more years after the launch of its first production model before we see that vision though. In the meantime, expect to see a lot of biting skepticism thrown at Faraday until it shows us something more substantive.

SEE ALSO: Check out Faraday Future's 1,000-horsepower electric supercar

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The startup trying to take on Tesla just flopped its first big announcement from Business Insider: Steve Kovach