Building cars is really, really hard

Everyone wants to be Tesla. Few if any will make it.

This aged much better than Dan Gardner likely anticipated:

Henry Ford, Elon Musk, and Proverbs 16:18

“I'm never buying a Tesla” has long struck me as the automotive version of “I'm canceling my New York Times subscription,” with Elon Musk's electric car company continuing to do well even as he drives his reputation - and his social media platform - straight into the ground. (Price cuts have helped.)

Still, if you have sworn off Tesla but want a state-of-the-art electric vehicle, you no longer lack for alternatives. One of these is Faraday Future, a company left for dead a few years back but now, against all odds, starting delivery of its FF91 crossover vehicle.

If Baymax was in one of the “Cars” movies.

That's the good news. The bad news, according to The Race Day, is that it’s not quite ready for public consumption, especially at the obscene price point:

Ryan Drives: Faraday Future FF 91

When it was finally my turn, I climbed into the driver’s seat of the FF 91 and took stock of the cabin. The interior is dominated by screens — a skinny one in front of the driver, a center-mounted tablet and a laptop-sized one in front of the passenger. The steering wheel is pretty cool. The seats are insanely comfortable. Everything else needs work.

There’s smudgy, glossy piano black everywhere. It covers the entire center console, and the control screen built into the driver’s door that controls opening and closing, locking and unlocking, and a bunch of other functions. It covers the door sill (which I think is a first?).

The air conditioning vents look like metal but are obviously cheap plastic to the touch. In fact everything you touch feels a little bit worse than you’d expect. The buttons on the steering wheel and window controls are confusing because they aren’t labeled. I would call this difficult to accept on a Prius. This is a $300,000 car.

[…]

How to explain the steering? Hmm. Like the brake pedal, the steering wheel felt surprisingly loose. It was a little too easy to turn from side to side without feeling much resistance. For a car with this much power I would normally expect more firmness. It only reacted to big movements.

That’s not to say that it had trouble turning. The FF 91 felt incredibly agile. I asked if it had rear-wheel steering, which felt like the sensation I was getting. The engineer riding shotgun responded that the car was setup for it but not activated. (?) I asked if it had rear torque vectoring then. The answer was that nope, it wasn’t that either. So I’m not quite sure what I was feeling. The car seemed precise. It just didn’t really line up with the steering exactly.

Also, Faraday Future’s test driver needed a full minute to open the driver’s side door. That must have been awkward.

---

I’d love nothing more than to see Faraday Future - and Canoo, and Nikola, and Bollinger, and Mullen, and Lordstown if they ever emerge from bankruptcy, and all of the other upstart electric carmakers - make a go of it. More competition is a wonderful thing.

But will any of the Tesla wannabes still be here by the turn of the decade?