#BlankCheck

Faraday Future hasn’t been making many headlines of late. But it remains an active business entity, surprisingly enough. On Thursday, it announced it had selected Velodyne Lidar Inc. as the exclusive supplier for the sensing/mapping hardware that’s going into its flagship FF91 EV.

Faraday’s missteps have been so frequent and gargantuan, that it would be impossible to give the abridged history without still wasting a large portion of your day. We’ll spare you from that and allow interested parties to dig through older articles about factory snafus, secret management structures, faked prototypes, development setbacks, bankruptcy, and more. The only thing you need to remember is that it is genuinely miraculous that FF still exists as a company – almost like it’s a testament to the utter ridiculousness of some tech startups – that continues to believe it will someday manufacture an electric car.

One of the strangest anomalies in the automotive industry is the way electric vehicle startups (like technology companies in general) seem to draw limitless support from investors while established automakers don’t receive nearly the same kind of love — even when transitioning toward EVs.

There’s a logic behind this, however. Green tech is overwhelmingly trendy at the moment, even if some of it lacks a comprehensive game plan to actually save the environment, and financial backers are always looking to get in on the next big thing before anybody else — resulting in scattershot investing that sometimes coalesces into a major victory for new firms possessing sufficient moxie.

But it hasn’t helped the auto industry’s largest players, who are seen as dinosaurs using the blood of their forebears to amass their fortunes. They lack the presumed purity of brands like Tesla or Nikola (clever name), even though their financial goals seem largely the same.

A potential solution to this problem is to distance tech-focused entities from the core business.