The best look we have at the potential of Faraday Future’s first car is a series of drag races the company showed off beating a Bentley Bentayga, Ferrari 488 and Tesla Model X. But there’s something that’s weird about the drag races themselves.
Watch the full teaser here, showing the FF prototype whupping butt. Electric cars are fast as all heck off the line.
As Techspot first noticed, these tests were held at the Irwindale drag strip. That drag strip is an eighth of a mile long. Techspot also pulled up this Google Earth view of the strip. Note that the finish line is over on the right, the starting line is on the left and billboards run along most of the length of the track.
Now note that the cars lining up in Faraday Future’s videos end at the finish line but start at the end of the billboards. The shadows make this easy. I will even rip off Techspot’s lovely graphic to illustrate the full eighth mile in red versus what the FF teaser shows in light blue.
Faraday Future’s test races are only running a fraction of the 1/8th mile drag strip, itself only a half of the usually standard for speed, the 1/4 mile.
Now, initially I had no idea why Faraday Future was choosing such an immensely short distance for its races until I looked at some 1/8th mile results for the similarly-quick Tesla Model X. One X ran the 1/8th mile in about 7.3 seconds, and does 0-60 in 3.2 seconds, as one InsideEVs post reports. That means the X only covers a few hundred feet in its 0-60 run.
With a little eyeballing calculation, this drag race was about 2/5ths as long as the full 1/8th mile strip, making it about 0.05 miles long, or 260-odd feet. That’s right in the ballpark for how much distance it would take a slightly-quicker-than-a-Tesla-Model-X car to run to 60 miles per hour.
So I would guess this test was only from 0-60 mph. Is that particularly misleading, as Techspot put it? It’s not too bad, I don’t think, but it’s just a little bit sneaky, and it shows that Faraday Future really isn’t giving us any more information with these teasers than it said it would. All we know is how fast its prototype is to 60, and if a Bentley, Ferrari or Tesla walks it above that speed, well, Faraday Future isn’t about to tell us. I guess it’s entitled to want to control its message.
We have reached out to Faraday Future for comment and are waiting to hear back.
If you have any other information about Faraday Future, please email me at raphael at jalopnik dot com.