In early 2016, electric vehicle company Faraday Future celebrated a deal with the state of Nevada—in exchange for building a $1 billion factory that would eventually employ up to 4,500 people, the company would get $335 million in tax cuts from the state.
Later that year, Faraday Future negotiated another deal on a former Navy shipyard in Vallejo, California. There, the electric vehicle company would build a second factory and a “customer experience center.”
Now, neither of those two projects is happening as planned. In March, Faraday Future said it would not move forward with the Vallejo site and told investors that it would be cutting its billion-dollar Nevada site down considerably, from a three-million-square-foot facility to a 650,000-square-foot facility. Earlier this month, the Le Eco-backed startup said it wouldn’t be building on the Nevada site at all, opting to put a base at a smaller site in either California or Nevada. It will, however, hold the property it bought at the site for “long-term vehicle manufacturing,” according to the Nevada Independent.
The move is not entirely surprising—Faraday Future has struggled with money woes and hasn’t had a production-ready vehicle to date. In 2016, it was hoping to have such a car coming off the lines by 2018, but now that goal is much farther out. Last year, the state treasurer of Nevada traveled to China to personally investigate whether Le Eco had the funds to build the factory, and he seemed to be satisfied.
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