Things are not goin' well for these guys. 
Kirby Garlitos wrote:2016 has been a tough year for a lot of people, and with a little over two weeks left before the calendar flips a page, 2017 just can’t come fast enough. Add the folks over at Faraday Future to the list of people who are more than ready to bid adieu to 2016.
It’s been a tough year for the automotive startup and there appears to be no room in sight for any respite as a fresh report from Buzzfeed News indicates that Faraday is looking at two new lawsuits from its partners stemming from missed and unpaid payments.
One of these companies is Faraday supplier Futuris, best known within automotive circles for developing seating and interior components for several Chinese manufacturers and a handful of major automakers, including Ford, General Motors, and Toyota. According to the report, Futuris filed the lawsuit over claims that Faraday has been late on payments amounting to $10 million, of which $7 million is more than 30 days behind the agreed upon schedule.
If that’s not bad enough, the electric car maker was also on the receiving end of another lawsuit, this time from California-based property owner Beim Maple Properties, which is alleging that Faraday has missed out on warehouse rent payments totalling $104,950.50.
The two new lawsuits came after another Faraday partner, construction firm AECOM, came out with its own statement saying that the automaker was $21 million behind on its payments for September 2016 and another $37 million behind on payments for October and November 2016. The delayed payments forced AECOM to halt construction of Faraday’s $1.3 billion car factory in Las Vegas.
All these lawsuits are coming at the wrong time for Faraday as the company is a few weeks away from unveiling its much-hyped electric car at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show. The lead-up to that event has now been cast under a dark cloud that is unlikely to go away anytime soon, not after Chinese tech billionaire Jia Yueting, the man funding the whole business, published a letter to Bloomberg News that was addressed to employees, admitting that the company “blindly sped ahead,” forcing its case demand to balloon. “We got over-extended in our global strategy. At the same time, our capital and resources were in fact limited,” Jia added.
With no clear-cut strategy in place other than asking for more financing from investors, the future of Faraday Future is as murky as it’s ever been, maybe even worse.
Let’s All Hope For The Best Now
I don’t take pleasure in seeing an automotive startup fall flat on its face, even if said startup was as ambitious as they come. The truth is, I want Faraday Future to succeed just as I wanted all other automotive startups that have failed in the past to have succeeded.
I’m just afraid that Faraday is at the point of no return at this point. The debts are rising and the financial well it had has all but dried up. Sure, some money has been raised but is that going to be enough to not only pay off all the debts it has incurred and still have some to spare to keep the project going? Faraday’s the only one that can answer that now, but from what people who know far more than I am have been saying, it’s not something that I’m willing to put money on.
Faraday has been saying all the right things to quell the growing concerns about its future and a spokesman for the company even told BuzzFeed News that it’s looking forward to debuting the car it has worked hard on at CES 2017. That’s great to hear, but not so when your dirty laundry is making headlines as we speak.
It’s hard to be confident and hopeful when you keep reading and hearing stories about problems arising within the company, whether it be the lawsuits, the missed deadlines, and a reported side project that took precious time away from developing its core project.
There are just too many distractions at this point to be hopeful for better days ahead. I wish I’ll end up being wrong with that statement, but these missed payments and lawsuits are real and they’re indicative on what kind of shape Faraday Future is in right now. The future of electric cars and autonomous driving technology may be as bright as they’ve ever been, but from the looks of things, the same cannot be said for the future of this once ambitious electric car startup.
Let’s hope I’m wrong, because at this point, that’s probably all that Faraday Future is clinging to right now.
