The world's largest consumer electronics show C-E-S, will officially kick off on Wednesday in Las Vegas. A Los Angeles-area company has been rumored to be working on an electric car that would take on Tesla, but it kept a tight lid on the details.
Faraday Future unveiled the FFZero1-a concept race car that seeks to redesign the automobile from the ground up.
It's an all-electric single-seat car where the driver sits at a 45-degree angle with a smartphone at the center of the controls.
"We're taking the inter-related, intuitive movements of digital devices and applying them to the interior of the vehicle to incorporate, swipes, pinches and touches. It's an extreme tablet on wheels," said Richard Kim, head of Global Design of Faraday Future.
With air tunnels to cut drag and cool batteries, a light carbon fiber body and four quad motors - the car's designers say the Zero1 will produce a thousand horsepower. Its top speed: more than 320 kilometers an hour.
But the key to the business model is the variable platform architecture - VPA - a modular base that allows builders to easily add components and change configurations.
"We can add or subtract strings of batteries. Based on those power cells we can create different models that have a different desired range without having to re-design the entire structure. This is really important in terms of time, cost and efficiency,"said Nick Sampson, Senior Vice President of Faraday Future.
Faraday Future is not only emphasizing the speed of the car, but also the speed at which the company as a whole is moving. It's hired 750 employees globally, and is expected within a few weeks to break ground on a new manufacturing facility in Nevada.
Faraday Future also revealed that it had built a strategic partnership with Chinese company LeTV - described as the Netflix of China.
Veteran Chinese auto executive and now LeTV executive Ding Lei even talked about how guilty he felt about producing cars that polluted the environment.
Now he wants to build something beneficial for the environment and humanity.
"But we are not sitting idle waiting for change. We, LeTV and Faraday Future, come here to change and create the future,"said Ding Lei, Co-founder of LeTV Electic Car Unit.
It will still be a couple of years before Faraday Future plans to deliver its first production car.
But with a team filled with former employees from Apple, BMW, NASA and most of all Tesla the E-V startup says it's confident about transforming the auto industry in the future.
