Faraday Future, a company that's looking to take on Tesla at the luxury end of the smart car market, has admitted that it had to put building its ambitious $1 billion factory on hold to finance its presence at CES this year.
When Faraday Future turned heads at CES 2016 with the launch of its concept car, it always seemed like an optimistic project that would need to overcome an awful lot of hurdles. Cashflow, it seems, is one of those major issues, according to Faraday's senior vice president of R&D Nick Sampson.
In an interview with the BBC, Sampson confirmed that work on the factory in which to build the vehicles had been halted to fund CES, but that it's only a temporary hold.
"The challenge of building a new company is that it’s not just doing the engineering and R&D work, we’ve got manufacturing to keep aligned, we’ve also got the whole sales and marketing, branding and imaging," Sampson said.
At CES 2017, the company showed off an altogether more realistic electric car design, dubbed the FF91, which the company claims goes from 0-60 in just under 2.5 seconds. It's also got some self-parking smarts, and is expected to offer other autonomous functions in the future.
Faraday Future says it'll start selling the FF91 in 2018, and you can put down a $5,000 (£4,106) refundable deposit, but only if you're based in the US, Canada or China for now.
