New Electric Car Company Emerges: Faraday Future | Hacker News Reader

New Electric Car Company Emerges: Faraday Future

wot.motortrend.com

88 pointsallanberger51 comments

I sincerely doubt a "super-futuristic" aesthetic is going to catch on in the mainstream. One of the reasons the Model S has done so well is because it resembles other large luxury sedans that it competes against.

One very thing in particular about futuristic designs, to include many recent domestic cars (like the new dodge sedans and sports cars) is little vertical space given for windows. In contrast, one of the great things about the Porsche 911 design is that you have incredibly clear 360 views with big windows. That's a major design feature that separates cars that are in continuous production for over 50 years and those that need design refreshes every few years.

Best of luck, FF.

Yeah, I'm 24 and hate the narrow windows and huge side wall look. Also, Porsche's are...amazing. One of the best and longest lasting designs in the car industry. So iconic and known anywhere. It'd be hard for any company to touch the Porsche 911.

The Porsche 911 is an exercise is excellent engineering defying abysmal physics. That big engine hanging way out over the rear wheels... Well any first year engineering student could tell you why that's a bad idea. But they do drive like a dream.

On another note, my daily driver is a Charger with gunslit windows, and you do get used to it. That, and the fact that it's a 485 hp engine mated to a Mercedes transmission and suspension, and it drives as well as any 7-series I've ever driven.

Remember the Honda Civic hybrid? No? It predated the Prius and looked exactly like a Civic. The first generation Prius looked pretty normal, too. It wasn't until the second generation Prius, with its radical styling that announced it was a hybrid, until it took off.

Prius came first (introduced in 1997), then came the Honda Insight (1999) - the Civic hybrid rolled off around 2001.

2nd gen. Prius was introduced 2003, but sales only picked up around 2005 < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Prius >. The design wasn't the only factor - I would say Toyota's marketing and rising gas prices contributed too < http://zfacts.com/gas-price-history-graph >.

You realize that ever-thicker doors and ever-smaller windows are all about crash test performance, right? The 911 is suffering from the exact same problem as the year go on. I've never thought of the 911 as having particularly good visibility anyway, but I guess the low hood and upright windshield helps.

> It will have 15 percent higher specific energy than a Tesla Model S 85 kW-hr pack. That works out to 98 kW-hr.

Except that their ship date is 2 years out (best case, since it's really aggressive!). That gives Tesla a pretty good window to improve their own battery packs. This isn't a market you can win by getting a 10% improvement on battery life / range -- there's a lot more nuance than that. I hope they have other value propositions in mind...?

I think those numbers, on their own, are as good as meaningless. Volume, weight, and price of the battery pack and either of these relative to the size/power efficiency of the car will be way more important than that relatively tiny difference in capacity.

I think the author of the article might be confused. "Specific energy" normally refers to energy per unit mass, which is a useful thing to compare between batteries. The author is acting as though it refers to total capacity, which is less meaningful.

I came here to comment on that; almost as bad as "X Watts of Power, which is enough to run an average household for Y hours"

There is definitely a gap between Leap and Tesla in driving range. Tesla does 400 miles in a charge where leap does 70 or smth?

There won't be much need for competition between EV-manufacturers for another decade or so.

As long as the car has some type of niche/edge over Leaf/Tesla and can convince ICE-drivers to go electric there should be enough demand to grow a startup for 5-10 years.

"should' being the key word. There have been dozens of failed Electric car and electric motorcycle startups in the last 5 years alone. As far as I know, Tesla is the only startup to actually make a viable production car. Zero and Brammo are the only ones to make a viable production electric motorcycle and Brammo was just sold to Polaris because of money troubles. Every once in a while, companies come along with a prototype and a dream (Mission Motors, for example). But few ever make it far enough to put anything into production. It's considerably more expensive than a software startup, for example.

  i personally know one of the first people that brought electric cars to your country (im assuming USA, sorry if im wrong!) and i know for a fact he was sunk by your oil companies on purpose and they threw the idea away. in his case, it certainly wasnt anything to do with a lack of market or bad business decision, big corporations ruined him on purpose.

You're dead, gorgak, but I'll respond anyway because it's a point I think needs addressing. I don't think the oil companies single out electric car companies for failure (at least not anymore... Nissan and Tesla have broken that seal), but I do know the car manufacturers do. One of the biggest reasons electric car and motorcycle companies fail is they underestimate the cost of homologation[0]. Those regulations were lobbied for by the car companies to make sure they weren't seriously threatened by any new competition, electric or otherwise. There's a reason the only new american car startups that make it to production are three wheeled designs. Three wheelers are exempt from most of the ridiculous legislation.

[0]: https://evmc2.wordpress.com/2015/06/21/homologation-whats-th...

Given Tesla announced a 90kWh pack yesterday I tend to agree

Interesting, of course talk is cheap as they say. I don't think anyone has spun up a factory to make something as sophisticated as a car in less than 14months though. That is going to be a real challenge, and supply chain? Fugiddaboutit! Not to mention the entire world's supply of Lithium battery production for the next 4 years is already allocated, going to be really tough to hit the 2017 date I think. But those things aside, the world could use more voices in the space, if only to keep the folks in the space looking in their rear view mirror and improving.

It is interesting to see that a new company is employing 200 persons and hiring at a rate of 10 per week.

In my opinion, this has been carefully planned long ago.

Well, with a name like that, I would naturally assume they are using super capacitors instead of lithium chemistry batteries. This would make sense if there was a challenge (or high cost) to getting sufficient current out of the cells-- but Tesla's acceleration capabilities are about the max you could want to safely put into a passenger car I think.

Or maybe they just took the name cause it's associated with electricity.

In that case, I think "Faraday" would be a much better name. Adding "Future" to it makes it sound like it's a fictional high tech company from the 1950s. Feels retro.

With capacitors you can also get the charge into the cells a lot faster, possibly. Also there are issues of energy density, overall weight, etc.

They should have called themselves 'Edison'. Bring back a bit of the old rivalry.

Would it end up acquiring Tesla and bankrupting it?

Too obvious maybe. Anyway, electrocuting elephants has been done before. Maybe this time create a sexy start-up, grab hype then flame out spectacularly. Just the thing to FUD a nascent EV industry.

Already exists: http://www.edison2.com/

Existing battery's energy density is already a long obstacle to prevent us from making lighter smaller EVs. And super capacitors energy densities are even lower[1]! Now with new materials like graphene or carbon nanotubes are promising, but they are definitely not ready for primetime in 2017 [2]!

[1] http://my.teslamotors.com/fr_CA/forum/forums/use-battery-pac... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercapacitor

So Tesla started with luxury cars only. Well that's all you can buy still. I feel this companies real opportunity with a 2017 launch date would be a mass produced, under 40k EV. That will be right around the time Tesla might release the model 3. This company clearly has some massive funding and talent behind them, sounds like they can afford to start on the mass produced midrange EV right from the get go and be really successful. The market is begging for a 40k EV that is not the Chevy volt... We want a 40k tesla (or FF).

Unlikely, the perils of trying to make a vehicle for the cheapest price possible can easily kill your company.

Tesla started as a niche electric sports car company 4 years before the Model S.

This is great news. As exited I am about Tesla, the more companies producing electrical cars, the better for all. When I read "a new electrical car startup" I was sceptical, but looking at who works there, there should be some business plan behind the company. Perhaps we really now live in a day and age where car startups become possible. That would mean some exciting times ahead for quick progress in the mobility sector.

I wish them good luck. The car market could use more players that attract attention to high-quality electric cars. However, I'm not so sure about this sort of "all-star" unnaturally born companies. I think they usually fail. But at least these guys aren't making a hybrid, so they probably won't screw it up with old-think.

They have a cool logo and I'm all for further progress in this field and hope the best, but I have a feeling this is yet another ooh-shiny company lacking the ability to really build something on the scale of what Tesla has done. The fact that the lead designer built the i3 doesn't bode well either.

> The fact that the lead designer built the i3 doesn't bode well either.

The i3 on your resume is better than nothing. At least some of their team members shipped something real.

why doesn't that bode well?

It's quite an ugly vehicle.

http://www.bmw.com.au/_common/shared/newvehicles/i/i3/2013/s...

On a recent trip to Norway I saw a lot of them on the road and I have concluded that the i3 looks a lot better in person (and in context) than in photographs. Photos, particularly staged press photos, seem to emphasize its odd shape and unusual lines.

Conversely, I think the Model S looks a lot better in photographs than in person. I don't know why, brains are weird.

Because the i3 was an abortive product in every way. It's hideous, the range is terrible (80 mi), the charge time is impractical (3h on a 220V and 10h on a 110V), and they wanted $45k for it.

I have seen a few of them around Silicon Valley, FWIW.

It doesn't really appeal to me either, but a few people are buying them.

It's a premium Leaf. It's hard for people to understand premium electric car, when electric = economy in many people's minds.

The first time I drove an i3, I immediately got it -- "oh, it's a BMW. It's actually a nice place to be". The driving dynamics were great, and the design astoundingly useful and space-efficient. You really have to play with it in person to appreciate how much space there is and yet how compact the body is.

People will pay extra for luxury cars that don't DO anything functionally different from a run-of-the-mill sedan. Why not pay more for electrics that don't do anything different from run-of-the-mill electrics?

"It's hideous"

I think they look quite nice, much nicer than they do in pics - not as nice as the drop-dead gorgeous i8 though!

I think the big white space left by Tesla (aside from cheap cars, which is problematic) is reconfigurable or cargo/commercial.

I think the LEAF has a 7 seated taxi variant, as well as a cargo van version. I believe this is a growing segment as the lower fuel and maintenance costs have more impact as you drive more miles.

There is at least one taxi driver in Oslo, Norway, who uses a Tesla S. You don't necesarily need a special variant to use as a taxi.

I'm sorry, why am I looking at renderings of the corporate headquarters instead of at least additional rendering of the vehicle exterior and interior?

I hope they just leap the driven electric car and focus on an autonomous electric car.

In case anyone was looking for the not-mobile version (removing the "m." doesn't work!), it's here: http://wot.motortrend.com/1507_new_california_based_electric...

Thanks. Can a mod please change the link?

Thanks, we updated the link.

Is this their website?: http://faradaymotorworks.com/home

It looks pretty...nondescript (and ugly but that's subjective I guess). +yahoo small business webhosting

No, it's not. This is their website: http://faradayfuture.com/

http://faradayfuture.com/

Nope. http://faradayfuture.com

Another car for the 1%. Is this really necessary?

"Connected" may not be the future of cars. The Google self-driving car isn't very "connected". It doesn't talk to other cars, nor does it need to. It watches what's happening in the real world. Urmson, who heads Google's self-driving effort, threw cold water on the "connected car" people at a conference recently. All the effort on car-to-car communications is a complete waste of time for automatic driving.

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