Faraday Future increasingly appears to be in a tenuous position, and now it seems the company is starting to realize as much: the San Francisco Chronicle is reporting the troubled start-up has ended talks with the city of Vallejo on a 157-acre site, and instead focus on completing the not-nearly-completed $1 billion factory in Nevada.
Hopes in Vallejo were high last year when the deal was announced. The California city filed for bankruptcy several years ago, so FF’s planned second assembly plant—the first new car factory in decades, according to the San Francisco Business Times—and an accompanying showroom made for a notable development.
The Vallejo City Council voted last May to give Faraday exclusive negotiating agreement for the site, but that’s now over. From the San Francisco Business Times:
Los Angeles-based Faraday “would like to thank the city and its officials for their generosity and professionalism throughout this process, and looks forward to exploring future opportunities with the city,” the company said in a statement.
The three-year-old company had initially said Vallejo would be its second production facility, which it would build after it finished constructing a 3 million-square-foot factory in North Las Vegas, at a cost of around $1 billion. The company has said it plans to have an electric car on the market by 2018, with aims to take on Tesla and its rival line of vehicles.
The scuttled negotiations in Vallejo follows reports that Faraday’s main backer—China-based LeEco—is planning to sell land in California that it purchased barely a year ago from Yahoo.
Shit, it appears, has gotten real.
Correction: A previous version of this post said that LeEco is looking to sell land it owned in Nevada that it previously had purchased from Yahoo. The piece of land is located in California. We apologize for this error.