QOTD: Does Faraday Future Deserve The Dogpile?

Jack Baruth
by Jack Baruth

Faraday Future, the Chinese-answer-to-Tesla car company whose travails have been worthy of three concurrently running soap operas even though they have yet to put a single car anywhere near a showroom, debuted a sorta-concepty-production thing this week. And boy oh boy did the knives come out. But why?

Totally femmed-out Brooklyn hipster Andrew Hawkins whined about FF’s lack of humility, as if the mere act of assembling a uniquely engineered car wasn’t to running a “tech culture” website as landing on the moon is to accidentally shitting on your own feet. Jalopnik called the FF’s presentation “embarrassing” and “interminable”, perhaps forgetting that once upon a time they devoted an entire day to an archival shot of Steve McQueen’s flaccid penis. Even the New York Daily News, which until this moment was primarily notable for featuring the work of Shaun “Talcum X” King, a person who identifies as white or black depending on the opportunities facing him at the moment, called the FF 91 reveal cataclysmic.

You will search long and hard for any comparable venom unleashed by the press on any other automobile manufacturer doing business in the United States, particularly if the manufacturer in question is able to put people up in a five-star hotel for a lifestyle press event. TTAC’s former Editor-in-Chief Ed Niedermeyer, a fellow with whom I have had no small number of disagreements over the years, calls this a prime example of The Wobble. I think he might be right. I also think that the minute Faraday Future starts sending people to Tenerife for three-day press events, all of this negativity will blow away like so many dandelion seeds before a hurricane wind.

But I could be wrong. This could all be very principled criticism. What say you, B&B? Should Faraday Future be lampooned? Encouraged? Held to a higher standard? Pushed back into the Pacific by main force of arms?

Does it even matter?

[Image: © 2017 Seth Parks/The Truth About Cars]

Jack Baruth
Jack Baruth

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  • Chan Chan on Jan 09, 2017

    Yes, because Jalopnik is not the only place that gives it flak for being all hype and no product. Why does a company who claims to "change the future of driving" even bother to show a video about drag racing a Ferrari? Faraday Future, the Theranos of cars.

  • DirtRoads DirtRoads on Jan 13, 2017

    I absolutely don't give a damn. I'll never buy a Chinese car. I've bought a lot of Chinese shit, but neither their airplanes nor their cars will I spend money on.

  • CanadaCraig You can just imagine how quickly the tires are going to wear out on a 5,800 lbs AWD 2024 Dodge Charger.
  • Luke42 I tried FSD for a month in December 2022 on my Model Y and wasn’t impressed.The building-blocks were amazing but sum of the all of those amazing parts was about as useful as Honda Sensing in terms of reducing the driver’s workload.I have a list of fixes I need to see in Autopilot before I blow another $200 renting FSD. But I will try it for free for a month.I would love it if FSD v12 lived up to the hype and my mind were changed. But I have no reason to believe I might be wrong at this point, based on the reviews I’ve read so far. [shrug]. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it once I get to test it.
  • FormerFF We bought three new and one used car last year, so we won't be visiting any showrooms this year unless a meteor hits one of them. Sorry to hear that Mini has terminated the manual transmission, a Mini could be a fun car to drive with a stick.It appears that 2025 is going to see a significant decrease in the number of models that can be had with a stick. The used car we bought is a Mk 7 GTI with a six speed manual, and my younger daughter and I are enjoying it quite a lot. We'll be hanging on to it for many years.
  • Oberkanone Where is the value here? Magna is assembling the vehicles. The IP is not novel. Just buy the IP at bankruptcy stage for next to nothing.
  • Jalop1991 what, no Turbo trim?
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