Mon, Nov 9, 2015, 3:39pm EST - US Markets close in 21 mins
Mysterious electric car startup looking to build $1B factory
By JUSTIN PRITCHARD
21 hours ago
Headquartered in a low-profile office just south of Los Angeles, Faraday is holding a lot of details close. Though it won't confirm the source of its funds, documents filed in California point to a parent company run by a Chinese billionaire who styles himself after Apple's late Steve Jobs.
Based on the few other public clues, Faraday is following the path blazed by Tesla Motors, its would-be rival hundreds of miles away in Silicon Valley.
Like Tesla, Faraday's car will be all-electric, and debut at the high end.
The
startup of about 400 employees has poached executive talent from Tesla
and also draws its name from a luminary scientist — Michael Faraday —
who helped harness for humanity the forces of nature.
Even
Faraday's public announcement that California, Georgia, Louisiana and
Nevada are finalists for the factory mirrors the approach Tesla took to
build a massive battery factory. Nevada won that bidding war among
several states last year by offering up to $1.3 billion in tax breaks
and other incentives.Faraday hopes to distinguish itself by branding the car less as transportation than a tool for the connected class.
"People's lives are changed by their mobile devices, the way that we interact," Faraday spokeswoman Stacy Morris said. "The car industry hasn't caught up sufficiently. The car still feels like a place where you're disconnected."
Just what that means could hit the road as early as 2017, when Faraday has said it wants to bring a car to market.
The timeline is ambitious, given that it typically takes automakers at least three years to go from concept to production — and that's when they already have their factories up and running.
"Developing an electric vehicle platform from scratch takes many years and doing it in 18 to 24 months would be a precedent-setting event, if it could be done," said John Gartner a director at the market intelligence firm Navigant Research.
Then again, Faraday was around for more than a year before its recent public coming out. It was originally incorporated in California in May 2014 as LeTV ENV Inc., according to papers filed with the California Secretary of State. The address in Beijing is associated with Letv, a holding company founded by Chinese tech pioneer Jia Yueting.
Yueting is referred to as China's equivalent of Jobs, both for his talk of "disrupting" traditional industries as well as his jeans and T-shirt wardrobe at product launches.
Faraday spokeswoman Morris wouldn't comment on Yueting.
"We're in stealth mode where we're not revealing ownership," she said. "There's a significant investor who wants the company to stand on its own merit before being associated" with it."
Navigant
projects that the luxury plug-in market will grow in the U.S. from
109,000 cars or SUVs next year to 468,000 in 2023. With a market share
increase from 0.7 percent to 2.6 percent of all "light duty vehicles"
(which also includes vans and pickup trucks), it's still a niche market.
And
by 2023, there will be even more competition — automakers other than
Tesla plan to compete for customers who want luxury electric vehicles.
"The market's only going to get more challenging," Navigant's Gartner said.
___
Barbara Sambriski in New York contributed.
___
Contact Justin Pritchard at https://twitter.com/lalanewsman .
end quote from:
Mysterious electric car startup looking to build $1B factory
LOS
ANGELES (AP) — The luxury electric car market may be small, but it's
lucrative enough to get another jolt — this time from a mysterious
startup that says it wants to re-imagine how people interact with their
autos.
Associated Press
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