Remember how we could barely believe that a car company could emerge from the ether and start construction on a massive Nevada production facility? Guess what! Faraday Future’s $21 million behind on construction payments.
Automotive News dug up that Faraday Future owes its construction company a solid $21 million on its proposed Nevada factory, budgeted in total to one billion dollars. Here’s the meat of the story:
In an Oct. 10 letter, Robert Gay, vice president and project executive at AECOM — which is overseeing $500 million of work on the roughly $1 billion, 3 million-square-foot plant — cites an unpaid $21 million deposit, due in September, to an escrow account to cover material costs and subcontractor work. A copy of the letter was obtained by Automotive News.
At first it wasn’t exactly clear to me how critical an issue this was to the project’s financial security, confidence and credibility. However, AECOM specifically states in its letter that this is “a critical metric to project financial security and maintaining confidence and credibility with our project subcontractors and suppliers.” Well then.
Automotive News reached out to Faraday Future, which replied that its relationship with AECOM is continuing and “strong.”
Faraday Future is backed by the same Chinese company LeEco that couldn’t get its own electric car of the future on stage for its American reveal last week. FF itself is best known, as well, for announcing that it was going to blow the automotive industry wide open with a grand reveal at CES last year and showed a pretty ordinary pie-in-the-sky concept car straight out of the 1950s.
What Faraday Future has been best at so far is offering lots of hype and draining hundreds of millions of dollars out of the state of Nevada.
FF has been testing camouflaged cars on the road since but have demurred about showing an actual production-ready model at the next CES.
I’m sure everything over there is fine and this will be sorted out in no time.