QOTD: Does Faraday Future Deserve The Dogpile?

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]