The reports that Faraday Future is dead and buried may be a bit premature. The company says it will race a FF 91 in the 95th Pikes Peak hill climb this year. It will compete in the Exhibition Class using a car that uses “production representative hardware and software” with certain modifications to accommodate the 156-turn track that has an elevation change of nearly one mile from start to finish.
Running at Pikes Peak will be part of the company’s “Testing the FF 91” video series that will document the efforts company engineers are making to make the FF 91 ready for production in 2018. The FF 91 will be driven at Pikes Peak by Robin Shute, principal engineer at Faraday Future.
“The hill climb on PikesPeak serves as the ideal setting to further develop the electric propulsion system and supporting thermal systems of FF 91,” said Nick Sampson, Senior Vice President of Research and Development. “Testing the performance of FF 91 in real-world conditions sets the bar even higher as we bring the vehicle to market in 2018.”
Faraday Future says it took 64,000 reservations for the FF 91 at the CES show in Las Vegas earlier this year, but how many of those will turn into actual sales is anybody’s guess. The company is in deep financial trouble and has been hemorrhaging top executives recently. It has dramatically scaled back its plans to build a factory in North Las Vegas and stopped its campaign to build a “customer experience” center and secondary factory on Mare Island north of San Francisco.
At this point, the Pikes Peak racer is the only FF 91 known to exist. The company apparently still has enough money for at least one videographer, but for how long? After all the hype about changing the electric car paradigm, the future of Faraday Future looks exceedingly gloomy at this point. But thanks for the cool videos, guys.
Source: Electric Cars Report
No comments:
Post a Comment