Faraday's factory shrinks, production capacity cuts tenfold: from 100,000 to 10,000

An official from North Las Vegas, Nevada, recently revealed to Reuters that the scale of the Nevada automobile manufacturing plant built by Faraday Future (FF) will be significantly reduced from the original plan: the factory originally planned to occupy 3 million square feet (about 278,000 square meters) of land will be reduced to 650,000 square feet (about 60,000 square meters), and accordingly, the annual production capacity of the factory will be reduced from the planned 100,000 vehicles to 10,000 vehicles.

Last month, at the CES in Las Vegas , LeEco's strategic partner FF just released its first mass-produced model FF91 and announced that the new car will be mass-produced in 2018. However, behind the launch of FF's first mass-produced car is an unconcealable financial dilemma.

As early as October last year, foreign media reported that Faraday Future owed nearly $46 million in construction fees to the general contractor of the factory construction project, causing the Nevada factory to be shut down. The news of the shutdown was confirmed by the factory contractor AECOM. LeTV's response to the shutdown was: FF's Nevada factory has never been shut down, the first phase of construction has been successfully completed, and the second phase of construction will begin in February next year.

But the storm did not subside, and since then, news about Faraday Future's financial crisis has continued to come out.

On December 16 last year, according to the latest news from BuzzFeed, a well-known American news aggregation website, FF was sued by its supplier Futuris, claiming that it owed more than $10 million, of which nearly $7 million was overdue for more than 30 days. In addition, another real estate developer from California, Beim Maple Properties, also sued Faraday Future for owing it $104,950.5. The media quoted FF insiders as saying that FF had at least nearly $300 million in debt on its books, which mainly came from payments to major suppliers and retailers.

After the high-profile launch of a new mass-produced car, there was news that Faraday Future had to stop factory construction because the launch was too expensive.

Now it seems that faced with high debts, FF, which has already released its first mass-produced car, has chosen to "grit its teeth" and put the new car into production, but at the same time, it has to reduce the size of the factory.

At the beginning of 2016, FF began to plan to build a car manufacturing plant in North Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. According to the company's plan, the area of ​​the Nevada plant will reach 3 million square feet (about 278,000 square meters), and the total cost will be about 1 billion US dollars. The Nevada government also passed a bill to give FF investment incentives, including a total of 215 million US dollars in tax incentives and exemptions, and 120 million US dollars in public expenses for infrastructure construction in the North Las Vegas Industrial Park. It is understood that as of the third quarter of last year, FF's engineering projects had spent about 600 million US dollars.

Architectural details of the factory that FF originally planned to build in North Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

However, this week, Qiong Liu, the Chinese-American city manager of North Las Vegas, Nevada, revealed that FF is working on building a "mini" car assembly plant at the original site: covering an area of ​​650,000 square feet (60,390 square meters), and the annual production capacity will be reduced from the originally planned 100,000 vehicles to 10,000 vehicles. The new plant will be completed and put into production in 2019.

In addition to cutting expenses to a certain extent, reducing the size of the factory seems to be "reasonable" considering FF's first mass-produced car, FF91.

According to the figures released by FF91 at the press conference: 1050 horsepower, 1800 Nm, 0-100 km/h acceleration in 2.39 seconds, the straight-line acceleration of this performance-level electric supercar can almost beat top rivals such as Tesla Model X and Ferrari 488GTB. At the same time, FF91 is equipped with various "black technologies" and advanced autonomous driving technology. At present, the expected price of this new car in the United States is as high as US$200,000 (approximately RMB 1.374 million). In terms of the technical difficulty of its own production, an annual production capacity of 10,000 vehicles is already a difficult task. Therefore, it will be more economical to increase the scale of the factory in stages after more models are added in the later stage to avoid idle production capacity.

In addition, although the scale of FF's Nevada factory in the United States is facing "shrinkage", Jia Yueting, the "financial backer" behind FF, is also investing heavily in building factories in China. Last November, LeTV planned to invest US$3 billion (about RMB 20.8 billion) to build the LeTV Super Car Industrial Park in the northern park of Moganshan High-tech Zone in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province, China. It plans to produce LeSEE and build car factories, battery factories and electric factories. It is expected to produce 200,000 cars a year in the first year, and will reach an annual output of 400,000 cars in the later period. The project was announced to start on December 28 last year, but all parties did not disclose the planned completion time of the first phase.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.