Faraday Future, an electric car company backed by a Chinese entrepreneur, said on Thursday it would invest $1 billion to build a 900-acre factory in a suburb of Las Vegas.
The company, which intends to compete with Tesla Motors but has not yet unveiled a product, said the plant in North Las Vegas would bring 4,500 jobs to the state.
“We plan to revolutionize the automobile industry by creating an integrated, intelligent mobility system that protects the earth and improves the living environment of mankind,” Jia Yueting, the billionaire founder and chief executive of Leshi TV, an Internet video service, wrote in a letter to Nevada legislators.
Faraday has offered little detail on its plans, but the company intends to unveil a concept car on Jan. 4 at the Consumer Electronics Show, a technology trade show in Las Vegas, and it hopes to bring a car to market as early as 2017.
The company had been also exploring sites in California, Georgia and Louisiana. Gov. Brian Sandoval of Nevada said on Thursday that Nevada had offered Faraday up to $215 million in incentives. State officials estimated the company would create 13,000 direct and indirect jobs and generate $760 million in tax revenue over 20 years, he said.
Last year, Nevada was also able to woo Tesla to the state to build a $5 billion battery production plant near Reno that it calls the Gigafactory. The state offered tax breaks worth about $1.25 billion over 20 years.
Faraday, based in California, has more than 400 employees, including a leadership team with several former employees of Tesla and other automotive companies. In addition to making electric cars, the company intends to develop “other aspects of the automotive and technology industries, including unique ownership models, in-vehicle content and autonomous driving.”
Faraday could provide a shot in the arm to the electric car industry, which has fallen well short of President Obama’s 2008 goal of having one million cars on the road by 2015. There are about 330,000, and car dealers have shown little enthusiasm for electric cars.
Tesla said in November that it was on track to produce more than 50,000 cars this year, and it began shipping its third model, the Model X, in September.
In a profile in The Verge, Nick Sampson, a senior vice president for Faraday, said the company would seek to differentiate itself from Tesla, but gave few specifics.
“Many people look at Tesla and think they’ve done it differently than the traditional auto industry — and they have,” he said. “But there’s other ways and other things we can capitalize on.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/11/a...yueting.html&eventName=Watching-article-click
The company, which intends to compete with Tesla Motors but has not yet unveiled a product, said the plant in North Las Vegas would bring 4,500 jobs to the state.
“We plan to revolutionize the automobile industry by creating an integrated, intelligent mobility system that protects the earth and improves the living environment of mankind,” Jia Yueting, the billionaire founder and chief executive of Leshi TV, an Internet video service, wrote in a letter to Nevada legislators.
Faraday has offered little detail on its plans, but the company intends to unveil a concept car on Jan. 4 at the Consumer Electronics Show, a technology trade show in Las Vegas, and it hopes to bring a car to market as early as 2017.
The company had been also exploring sites in California, Georgia and Louisiana. Gov. Brian Sandoval of Nevada said on Thursday that Nevada had offered Faraday up to $215 million in incentives. State officials estimated the company would create 13,000 direct and indirect jobs and generate $760 million in tax revenue over 20 years, he said.
Last year, Nevada was also able to woo Tesla to the state to build a $5 billion battery production plant near Reno that it calls the Gigafactory. The state offered tax breaks worth about $1.25 billion over 20 years.
Faraday, based in California, has more than 400 employees, including a leadership team with several former employees of Tesla and other automotive companies. In addition to making electric cars, the company intends to develop “other aspects of the automotive and technology industries, including unique ownership models, in-vehicle content and autonomous driving.”
Faraday could provide a shot in the arm to the electric car industry, which has fallen well short of President Obama’s 2008 goal of having one million cars on the road by 2015. There are about 330,000, and car dealers have shown little enthusiasm for electric cars.
Tesla said in November that it was on track to produce more than 50,000 cars this year, and it began shipping its third model, the Model X, in September.
In a profile in The Verge, Nick Sampson, a senior vice president for Faraday, said the company would seek to differentiate itself from Tesla, but gave few specifics.
“Many people look at Tesla and think they’ve done it differently than the traditional auto industry — and they have,” he said. “But there’s other ways and other things we can capitalize on.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/11/a...yueting.html&eventName=Watching-article-click
