Faraday Future Unveils Flagship Electric FF 91

After a troubled development cycle highlighted by problems including staff departures, financial struggles and lawsuits, automotive startup Faraday Future unveiled the FF 91, its flagship electric vehicle, at a press conference in Las Vegas Tuesday night.

Much of the presentation was spent highlighting the specifications and performance of the sports utility-like car, which is intended to target the higher-end driver market and go head-to-head with competitors in the field like Tesla. Throughout the event, Faraday Future executives walked through the car’s features, which include integrated mobile internet, the FFID user system that can recognize riders via Bluetooth and facial recognition and a suite of cameras and sensors that assist the car during driving and navigation.

In live demos with an internal FF 91 model, Faraday demonstrated what the car could actually do. During a self-parking demo outside of the presentation center, the FF 91 gradually wound through parking lot lanes before slowly backing into an open spot. The internal FF 91 model also raced against cars from Bentley, Ferrari and Tesla onstage to demonstrate its design and speed. Faraday claims that the FF 91 can accelerate from zero to 60 miles per hour in 2.39 seconds, which would put it ahead of the Tesla Model S.

While today’s presentation helps put distance from Faraday’s event during last year’s CES — in which only a non drivable concept car was shown — the FF 91 still faces a long road to the market. While potential buyers can register their FFID on Faraday’s website and can reserve cars with a refundable $5,000 deposit, the company didn’t release a final price point for the FF 91. In addition, Faraday estimates that deliveries will begin in 2018.

Despite hurdles like these and others — which included a botched demo near the end of the event where a production model failed to activate its driverless valet mode on-stage — Faraday hopes that the coming year will help validate the company’s lofty ambitions for the automotive space.

“Despite all the naysayers, the skeptics, we will persist,” Nick Sampson, Faraday’s senior vice president of product research and development said, closing out the event. “We will carry on to make the impossible possible.”