After months of financial woes and executive upheaval, fledgling California electric-vehicle maker Faraday Future is at last showing signs of scaling down its ambition?just as intrigue builds at its Bay Area rival, Lucid Motors, over a potential buyout from Ford.
Faraday Future has scrapped plans to build a mammoth $1 billion factory in Nevada, and it has reportedly failed to secure another major round of financing in recent months?despite having hired a new chief financial officer, former Deutsche Bank and BMW CFO Stefan Krause, earlier this year. Now the startup has recruited another big name from the Munich automaker: Ulrich Kranz, the former vice president in charge of the BMW i electric-vehicle sub-brand. According to a company release, Kranz initially will be in charge of coordinating resources and focusing ?on getting the FF91 to production quickly” [their italics]. At this point, Faraday Future needs to show that it can make its Plan B work. Doing that could include moving production overseas or repurposing an existing smaller facility in the United States, as well as downscaling its operations. The automaker got the hype machine going early with teasers starting in mid-2015, followed by its FFZERO1 supercar concept at the 2016 CES technology show in Las Vegas. Then it previewed the FF91, its production-bound all-electric crossover, with a showy evening event at CES this past January?and even allowed brief rides in the 1050-hp prototype.

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